Mikis the Greek

The eight-stringed bouzoukis twang in Byzantine ecstasy. The drums and guitars thump out military rhythms. The singers wail not about love or loneliness but about resistance, prison, freedom, dreams gone awry. This is the music of Greece's romantic revolutionary Mikis Theodorakis. In Greece his songs and instrumentals account for up to half the popular records sold (all surreptitiously). In the U.S., his sound tracks for the films Zorba the Greek, Z and State of Siege are known to millions. The man himself--Marxist, former member of the Greek Parliament, self-described composer to the masses--is a less familiar figure. Part of the reason: over the years he has fr quently found himself in Greek prisons for his outspoken ways.

Now Theodorakis has emerged from his Paris home-in-exile to make his first U.S. concert tour. It began two weeks ago in New York--outside Greece and Cyprus the largest Greek community in the world, with 400,000 Greek Americans --and by the end of the month will have taken him to 22 cities, including Chicago, the second largest. Last week found him at the Kennedy Center in Washington, B.C., backed by a seven-piece band and three singers, notably scarlet-voiced Greek Songstress Maria Farantouri.

Criticizing Theodorakis' music is like carping at the grammar of Tom Paine. As a youthful product of music conservatories in Athens and Paris, Theodorakis, a lawyer's son, was accomplished enough to write a symphony that could pass as minor Shostakovich. In the years after World War II, he aligned himself with the Communist partisans fighting the Greek monarchy and drew his first jail term. He decided that his real medium was the laiki moussiki (serious pop) central to the everyday lives of the Greek working classes.

Bullet Eyes. In Washington, his songs were an infectious blend of Moorish folk chants, tough cafe tunes and lyric ballads of the Greek islands. Most were narrative in style. Some were set to his own poems (Put off the light! The guard is knocking./ Tonight they will come again"), others to those of the late George Seferis of Greece and Pablo Neruda of Chile. All were tuneful, simple, direct, almost thunderous in their momentum - and impossible to resist. Theodorakis conducted the concert with windmill waving of the arms that bespoke the amateur maestro but was nonetheless effective. When it was over, the crowd, only partly Greek- American, gathered round the stage apron clapping and cheering, even reaching up to shake the composer's willingly offered hand.

At 48, Theodorakis is a tall, soft-spoken man with plentiful black curly hair and a soft expressive face pierced by close-set bullet eyes. Except, perhaps, in the six-room Paris apartment where he lives with his physician wife and their teen-age daughter and son, he rarely seems to relax his ideological stance.

Crossing a picket line to open his tour at Manhattan's Lincoln Center (with the permission of the striking members of the New York Philharmonic), he told his audience: "We are in absolute solidarity with the struggle of the American musicians." Thus it is all the more surprising that Theodorakis, a sworn enemy of Greek Dictator George Papadopoulos, plans to return to Greece in late December to test the new move toward liberalization there (TIME, Oct. 15).

Why go back? "Because,"; Theodorakis explains, "as a composer, I cannot get my inspiration anywhere else."

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