Greece’s traditional music has become poorer in recent hours, since the internationally renowned clarinet virtuoso Petroloukas Halkias passed away at the age of 90.

Born in 1934 in Delvinaki, Ioannina, Petroloukas started playing the clarinet at the age of 11, despite his father’s objections and immediately stood out at popular events for his innate gift for music.

In the 1960s he emigrated to the United States for twenty years, accompanying the expatriates with his musical instrument in their joys and sorrows, in their meetings and in their longing for their homeland. Besides, as he himself had stated in an interview with the journalist of the Ipeirotikos Agon, Vangelis Giftopoulos, “Traditional folk music expresses society, the world, the beauty of life, but also its problems”.

The acceptance of Petroloukas Halkias was so universal that he collaborated with a multitude of different artists: from American jazz musicians, traditional Indian musicians to the legendary singer Antonis Kiritsis, Haroula Alexiou, and Goran Bregovic. With his return to Greece in the early 1980s, it became immediately apparent that Halkias sought to keep alive the folk tradition of his homeland by giving his presence in concert halls, festivals, traditional feasts, the Megaron Athens Concert Hall, while turning himself into a bridge that often connected us with pieces of traditional music of other nations.

The people’s love for his talent could be completed through his own narrative (Ipeirotikos Agon) about how his art made a positive impression on jazz giants Benny Goodman and Lewis Armstrong: “When I went to America in 1960, two famous musicians, Benny Goodman and Lewis Armstrong, came to the joint where I was working to listen to me, having heard about me. They asked me how I had been playing for so long without reading and without a music stand, and how I remembered all this by heart? I tell them we keep the tradition and learn it all by heart. And they said: “If you went to school and knew how to read and write music, you would change the music in the world.”

What is certain is that the melodies of Petroloukas’ clarinet will forever accompany people in the wedding dances, the folk celebrations of the Assumption, and the funeral rites of loved ones.

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