Andreas Paragioudakis - HERITAGE (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. WAVES (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
02. KYKLONAS (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
03. PSITHIROS (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
04. PHOBOS (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
05. POEM FOR LOVE (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
06. ONEIRA (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
07. HERITAGE (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)
08. RETURN (feat. Peter Herbert, Martin Grabher, Aris Kapajannidis, Kristi Pleshti, Lauri Hämäläinen & Yenisey Rodriguez)

Heritage arrives with nothing behind it. Andreas Paragioudakis has issued it himself on vinyl and CD, and it sits outside the distribution network altogether — I could find no trace of it in any shop or catalogue. For a musician who has spent fifteen years building associations, festivals and choirs to get people into the same room, that self-sufficiency is at least consistent. However, it does mean the record will travel only as far as word of mouth and the merchandise table can carry it. On the evidence of what is in these grooves, that is a shame worth correcting.

He was born in 1980 in Rethymnon and came to the lyra at ten, adding guitar, tzouras and baglama as he went. The formal training arrived afterwards, and it was substantial: a piano diploma in Greece with G. Kaloutsis in 1999, then Salzburg from 2000 for piano pedagogy at the Mozarteum with Prof. G. Kern, completed in 2004. A year in India studying Indian classical music followed, then a return to Salzburg and the ORFF-Institut, and a master’s in Elementary Music and Movement Pedagogy with distinction in 2006. From 2010 he went back to the Cretan instruments he had grown up with, approaching them this time as a player carrying a conservatory apparatus he did not have at ten. That double grounding is the thing to hold onto here.

Bregenz has been his base for some years, and it explains the personnel. Peter Herbert studied at the Bregenz conservatory in the late seventies before Graz and Berklee took him further afield, so the bass chair is filled by a player who learned his trade a few streets from where Paragioudakis now works. Martin Grabher was born in Lustenau in 1982, studied jazz drums in the Netherlands and taught in Amsterdam, and has worked around Vorarlberg since 2011 — including in Paragioudakis’s own Unter der Laterne series, the 2018–2020 project that ran twelve concerts across Austria with sixteen musicians drawn from Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. He has been a fixture at the Vorarlberger Landestheater since the 2020/21 season. So the rhythm section comes with shared history, most of it made within an hour’s drive of the studio.

The quartet reaches further out: Aris Kapajannidis is Greek, Kristi Pleshti Greek-Albanian, Lauri Hämäläinen Finnish, Yenisey Rodriguez Cuban. Paragioudakis takes piano, Cretan lute and mandolin.

The titles repay a moment’s attention, and he has form here — every track on Salingari, his 2021 duo album with saxophonist Robert Bernhard, carried an English gloss beside the Greek. Nothing similar is offered this time, so: ‘Kyklonas’ is a cyclone, ‘Psithiros’ a whisper, ‘Oneira’ dreams, and ‘Phobos’ is fear, with the god of terror standing somewhere behind it. Read in sequence with ‘Waves’, ‘Poem For Love’, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Return ’, the eight titles move from weather into interior states and then back towards a place, and the music honours that shape closely.

The vinyl splits them four and four, seventeen minutes against twenty. Side one opens with ‘Waves’, where the density of the thing announces itself at once: a huge soundscape of instruments, lush arrangements, a great deal happening and all of it placed. Paragioudakis is plainly an expert in his field. The string writing here is where my ear went first, and it took me somewhere close to the territory Nitin Sawhney works in when he turns to strings — that same weight and sweep. ‘Kyklonas’ rides bareback through alpine trails, trotting, cantering, then galloping as the strings take us wind-swept. On ‘Psithiros ’, the lute brings dynamics that nothing else on the record can supply, and the tune unfolds and keeps unfolding, layering from first bar to last. Exquisite writing. ‘Phobos’ closes the side with Greek inflexions running through the scale and masterful musicianship on display throughout. Where has Paragioudakis been hiding this talent from me?

Side two opens quietly with ‘Poem For Love’, a stripped-back piano piece with strings and the longest thing here at six and a half minutes. ‘Oneira’ is bass-heavy with the lute afoot again and the Greek flavour running through it. The title track is a baroque piece, and Herbert’s bass on it is sublime. ‘Return’ closes, and if anyone hears the ECM sound in this record, this is where they are hearing it — I understand the reference on this piece.

Let me be clear about what this is not. It is not third stream. That label gets reached for whenever strings and improvisers share a room, and it does not describe what happens here — nothing on Heritage has the feel of two idioms being welded together for the experiment of it. Nor would I call it cinematic, for all that it would sit beautifully behind a film treading a searching path through its narrative. What it is, is a composer working from two grounds at once and finding the music that lives between them.