2016-2022

Taos
The time had come for the three of us, my friends and fellow-musicians Efrén López and Bijan
Chemirani and myself, to take our next step. It had already been five years since our first album
Mavra Froudia (Black Eyebrows). The Marseille company Full Rhizome soon made us a
proposal, and once everything had been discussed and organised we found ourselves in Mas de
Flors, a small village in Valencia known worldwide as the home of internationally acclaimed
artist Juan García Ripollés. There we arranged the compositions, the structure and the
orchestration of the album. Efrén, our technical expert, took over the production and began to
record the bases and his own solos in Spain, before arriving in Heraklion, hard copy in hand, to
Heraklion to complete Bijan’s and my recordings. The resulting album, Taos, has won rave
reviews, opening the way to the festivals and concert halls of Europe. I recall our journey with a
mixture of pride and nostalgia. We had a great time!

Stelios Petrakis Quartet US Tour – Carnegie Hall
Having participated in many major festivals around the world (India, Malaysia, Morocco, Paris,
Brussels and New York), the Cretan Quartet was honoured to be invited by concert production
company Robert Browning & Associates to the greatest concert hall in the US, Carnegie Hall.
Around this concert was structured a tour including five further appearances in Chicago,
Minneapolis, Boston and smaller cities. All by road, in a snowstorm, driving a car like a tank. An
amazing experience! For the first three concerts we shared the stage with two Greek-American
musicians, Michael Mavroudis and Christos Markakis, while in the others we played with top
Cretan musician and long-term partner Giorgos Manolakis. I owe them all a great deal! The six
concerts went very well, especially the one in Carnegie Hall, where the Zankel Hall venue filled
with New York music-lovers who were impressed by our music and dancing. At the end of the
tour, after many years of fatigue and internal disputes which I unsuccessfully did everything in
my power to resolve, the other three members left the quartet. My oldest partner, Dimitris
Chatzakis (on sound) remained, and of course my long-term partner and manager Amélie
Salembier with the Molpé Music production team.

Album “Spondi” (Libation) World Music charts No1
Together with the new members of the Quartet, Dimitris Sideris, Michalis Kontaxakis and Nikos
Lebessis, my primary aim is to create original material using their skills, and to record our new
album by shaping a new overall sound largely based on them. It would, after all, be dishonest, or
at least embarrassing, to play concerts with the new quartet while selling the previous CD. The
two-year lockdown was a great help during this period, offering us all the free time we could
wish for. The new compositions, thoroughly elaborated and orchestrated, the inspired playing in
the studio by ourselves and our exceptional guests, the extensive processing of the material, the
careful presentation of the whole edition with attractive texts and artwork, and the
environmentally aware raw materials and production methods, all resulted in our new album,”Spondi”, produced by myself and released in Greece and France in early 2022. The album won
rave reviews and awards in Greece and abroad, stayed in the Top 10 of the Transglobal World
Music Charts for two months, and, most importantly, reached # No. 1 of the World Music Charts
Europe for two consecutive months (July – August 2022), remaining in the Top 20 for another
two. I think all this will provide us with a ticket to new adventures and fresh challenges in the
near future. We will see…