| Sabir - Fones (Participants of L'Ham de Foc) 2004 Sokratako (Sokratis Sinopοulos/Sabir) SABIR was the lingua franca spoken in the Mediterranean ports during the medieval times, a language based on Catalan, Greek and Arab elements among others.It was born like a kind of natural progression due to the socialising of the merchants for whom the sea had become their home; people from many different cultures who were shaping their need to be understood by means of this new born language. SABIR gives us the image of the two furthest pillars in the Mediterranean sea: on the one part we have Greece, cradle of the Western civilisation, and on the other shore the Iberian land. Two places that define the ends of the sea shared by these two lands through which, from the ancient times, sailed the ships of merchants, pirates, romantic travellers and all kinds of adventurers. These people had turned sea shore settlements into culturally rich villages and were participating in this exchange of experiences and ways of understanding and living with other lands. In a similar way the three members of the Greek-Spanish group SABIR include into their repertoire traditional pieces from Mediterranean countries, as well as others which are original compositions but still strongly influenced by the traditional music of the Balkans, Persia, Greece, Flamenco or Western Medieval music. In a concert of SABIR ancient and oriental modes are merged with asymmetric rhythms and improvisations performed with ... |
