Takis Barberis

Naiva

'Naiva' is Takis Barberis' fourth personal album and charters him as one of the most earnest and aspiring new composers in Greece. This very album is an affirmation of Barberis' vested belief in the universality of sounds that are embedded in traditional and contemporary music. "the most profound of my desires", Barberis says, "is to turn into sounds and music all those personal and cultural experiences that have been following me. Yet as desires might get trapped to the names we give to categories of styles, music genres or the austerity of music idioms, what really counts is the truth that sounds contain, the space we open up for those sounds to exist, to freely move across boundaries and utter every single time something new and meaningful".
Naiva is a made up word. It ascribes to a name of a girl, (Greek or Indian by the very same token). It is a play on the open meaning of Naive and Nativus that might mean simple or even artless innocent as well as unsophisticated ungraceful, perhaps, or unassuming for that matter.
Barberis' affirmation also helps explain the difficulty to term the music of Naiva as jazz, ethnic fusion or all of the above. More than such a categorisation Naiva is a play on the clarity of sounds and the flowing of melodies. Already in his last album EPISODES (LYRA 0177) Barberis had demonstrated his unique ability to combine as diverse sounds as those of the renowned Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu, with those of the folk master of the clarinet Petros Lucas Halkias creating an entire landscape of music atmospheres and tints. In Naiva, Barberis further articulates such a music language with more eloquence and an even greater fluidity.
In all such fluidity of meaning, the only constant point of departure is Takis wandering anew to the infinite universe of interwoven sounds of the world. The sounds and resonance of Naiva make up a universal music language free of any need forgeographical specificity.

CD Contents

1 Naiva
2 Ceremony
3 Papa's radio
4 Unfolding the map
5 Polytropon
6 Hopes
7 Indiom
8 In his dreams
9 Marwa
10 Aura
11 Photopolis
12 Phantasmagoria
13 Peace, please

All compositions by Takis Barberis
Takis Barberis guitars, guitar synth, programming
George Polyhronakos drums, percussion
Yiogos Georgiadis fretless bass
Manos Saridakis acoustic piano, keyboards
Shankar Lal tabla
Reshma Srivastava Pizanis Sitar
Girish Chandra Srivastava tabla
Asha Srivastava tanpura
Petros Loucas Chalkias clarinet
George Kontrafouris acoustic piano
Takis Farazis accordeon
Takis Paterelis tenor saxophone

NAIVA
1 CD Set
Code: ML0660
Released: October 1998