Or that moment when The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia turns his back to the audience, focusing on nothing but the tiny red lights of his rig. For fans of Phish, it’s called ‘Trey Face’-that awkward look of guitarist Trey Anastasio lost in the magic of improvisation, Looking up, mouth agape, eyes withdrawn, staring blankly into the rafters of the stadium. The musician looks up in the air, as if he is in a state of intense creative output.įor fans of live improvised music, we know this look well. The marble is precisely carved to show the musician’s thumb hitting a string. Marbled Seated Harp Player is a Cycladic figurine known as one of the earliest representations of a musician in art.īelieved to be from 2,800 B.C., and excavated in nearby Naxos Island, this figurine is surprisingly detailed, showing a musician engaged in the act of plucking his stringed instrument. Then, years later in New York, I saw it, the figurine that led me on a life-long itch, an itch which ends in these notes. In these elegant figurines was no Zeus or Poseidon, but the suggestions of history that felt compelling to me: what did these people eat? How did they fish? Did they travel from island to island? What did their homes look like, and what stories did they tell to their children? Paros and nearby Naxos, where many of the Cycladic figurines were found, sit near the center of this island group. My handpainted map of the Cyclades islands. These figurines reminded me that there was a Greek history for me-the sparsely documented and almost completely unknown story of ordinary people who lived in the far flung locales of the distant past.
This old culture changed little over the millenia, and these figurines, like the culture that made them, also saw only incremental design changes over the millennia. Polished to a perfection by a civilization that was almost completely unknowable, lost to history. Rather, these figurines appear to have been made by ordinary people living in small windswept island villages. This was not the artwork of wealthy high courts from some classical era, nor was it tied to eras of war or glory. What’s more, they were carved on small islands in the Aegean Sea, many of them collected from Paros or its small sister island, Anti-Paros. Their simple lines made them elegant and timeless.īut the wall panels explained that these figures were carved in the Bronze Age, some of them five-thousand years old. These figurines looked modern, as if they were carved for an exhibit at MOMA. The room was dark, and only the displays were illuminated: a small collection of Cycladic statuettes and figurines. While visiting the Getty Villa Museum, I wandered into a small room, maybe it was the smallest room in the entire museum. Then, something extraordinary happened, and it changed my life. This sprawling villa, its fountains and pools and frescos, reminded me of my distaste for how we consumed ancient Greek history. When I was a freshman in college, I visited the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu which was modeled after the ancient Roman Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, filled to the brim with Greek and Roman antiquities.
ANCIENT GREEK LUTE WINDOWS
Featured in my doors and windows of the world gallery. Paros Door, painted in the color of summer bougainvillea blooms. I was never a fan of the faux-marble columns on square box mega-mansions, plastic grape vines and olive leaves. The over-quoting of Plato bugged me, and the drama and glory and valor of brutal war in films about ancient Greece felt repulsive and indulgent to me.Īt Greek restaurants, I was bothered by the worn out iconography lifted from old Greek vases, of frolicking Gods and the robed wealthy. I have always had a distaste for the way modern culture treats the subject, and the way travelogues jump right into Hercules or Plato or the Iliad and Odyssey or the battle of Troy. We’ve come here to explore Paros’ old sundrenched villages-and I’ve come with a very big question on my mind: could an ancient musical improvisational master, akin to a Django Reinhardt, Miles Davis or Jerry Garcia, have traveled through these islands, playing to audiences that sought out live spontaneous composition? Paros, neither particularly remote nor over-touristed, finds its following from Greeks and other Europeans who come for the food scene and the quiet.
Paros, shaped like an egg, sits in the center of the Cycladic islands-those 220 islands southeast of Athens which spill out into the Aegean Sea. ’ve just arrived on the Greek island of Paros with Jane and Kellan.
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