Daly’s Long, Winding Road to Mideast Music

Ross Daly was a shaggy-haired Irish cellist when he left California on a musical journey that followed the hippy trail to Afghanistan and India.

Eighteen years later, he is an internationally acclaimed performer of traditional Middle East music--the plaintive kind that Westerners used to call “weird” and “outlandish.”

“It wasn’t enough, being in London and learning the sitar in a vacuum,” the 36-year-old musician said. “I wanted to find out how Eastern music really worked. That meant exploring, and it took a long time.”

On the road, Daly took lessons from traditional musicians wherever he could find them--in workers’ cafes or at Muslim weddings, even at the whirling dervishes’ monastery at Konya in Turkey.

Daly performs and composes on a dozen exotic stringed instruments, from the stubby Turkish oud , a member of the lute family, to the resonant Afghan rambaba and his favorite old-fashioned Cretan lyra .

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His two latest albums, one solo and another with an international group he formed and called Lavyrinthos--the Greek spelling for labyrinth --received first-rate reviews in Greece and abroad.

“Ross is important for what he does to preserve the Middle East musical tradition . . . and because he doesn’t just imitate, he innovates as well,” said Lucy Duran, an American musicologist who heads Britain’s National Sound Archive.

A childhood spent in Japan, England and the United States gave Daly what he said was “an eclectic approach to music that meant I wasn’t stuck in the Western classical groove.”

His American music school training was useful for studying the structure of Oriental music and then dissecting its regional variations.

“We talk about Greek music being different from Turkish, or Syrian from Egyptian, but in fact they’re all part of a common musical tradition that stretches all the way from Bulgaria to India and goes back centuries,” he said.

That is what Daly and his group--which includes Turkish, Armenian, Greek and American musicians--tries to illustrate in performances that attract sell-out audiences in Athens clubs and cultural centers. Their music strips down traditional Oriental themes to reveal haunting, melancholy melodies or mesmeric rhythms.

“We don’t use amplifiers, and we like to play to no more than a couple of hundred people. That means we can’t really be considered a good commercial proposition for a mass market,” Daly said.

But after a dramatic rise in record sales over the past six months, Daly is preparing another album and also working on a documentary feature about traditional east Mediterranean music for British television.

His time is split between performances and recording sessions in Athens, a home on the island of Crete and concert trips to Western Europe. But he still travels in the Middle East several months a year to work on his repertoire and add to his collection of several hundred Oriental instruments.

“He’s a tremendously sensitive musician who’s developed a deep feeling for our music. He extracts its essence in his compositions,” said composer Manos Hadjidakis, who won an Academy Award for scoring the film “Never on Sunday.”