ROSS DALY

Cello in California, rabab in Kabul

Daly was born on 29 September 1952 in King's Lynn, Norfolk, to Irish parents, and spent a childhood scattered across the United States, Canada and Japan. He started on cello in California and was studying classical guitar in Japan by the age of eleven. Before he was out of his teens he had worked on sitar in India and on the rabab in Afghanistan — not as a tourist gathering souvenirs, but as a student sitting with teachers in the places those instruments belong.

That sequence explains a lot about what came later. Daly did not arrive at non-Western music as an adult convert looking for something exotic; it was simply the music that was around him while he was learning how to play anything at all. By the time he reached the eastern Mediterranean in the early 1970s he already had a working grammar for traditions built on mode rather than harmony, and an ear trained to hear a scale as a living thing with its own behaviour rather than a set of available notes.

Crete, and a teacher

He first went to Crete in the early 1970s and settled there in 1975. He has given the reason plainly: some things in life grab you, and Crete and its music did that for him. He put himself under Kostas Mountakis, the man who had done more than anyone to formalise the teaching of the Cretan lyra by setting up schools in the island's main towns. The relationship went past instruction — the two performed and recorded together, and Daly came out of it as a lyra player the Cretans themselves took seriously, which for a foreigner in a tradition that polices its own lineage carefully is not a small thing.

In 1982 he founded the Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Houdetsi, a village about twenty kilometres south of Heraklion. It began as a place to study the modal traditions of the world rather than a conservatory for Cretan repertoire alone, and over the years it accumulated the physical evidence of Daly's travels: more than 250 instruments, now on permanent display. From 2002 it ran seminars and masterclasses taught by musicians brought in from the traditions themselves — Persian, Turkish, Indian, Korean, Balkan — which made Houdetsi one of the few places where a student could work on santur one week and lyra the next without anyone treating that as a novelty.

In the summer of 2004 he took on the artistic direction of Heraklion's Olympic Games cultural programme, putting together fifteen concerts involving around 300 musicians from abroad.

Rebuilding the lyra

Around 1990 Daly did something more interesting than play the Cretan lyra well: he changed it. Borrowing from the Byzantine lyra and the Indian sarangi, he kept the three playing strings and added a bank of sympathetic strings beneath them — eighteen at first, later twenty-two — running over Indian-style jawari bridges so that each bowed note sets the others ringing. The effect is a drone that the instrument generates for itself, shifting as the mode shifts. It made the lyra capable of holding a long modal exposition on its own, which the traditional instrument was never asked to do.

He also plays the tarhu, a bowed instrument developed with the Australian maker Peter Biffin, alongside Afghan rabab and saz. The umbrella term he coined for what he writes with these instruments is contemporary modal music: pieces built on modal traditions that put very old practice next to modern compositional thinking, belonging to no single national repertoire. He has described the modal region as stretching from north-west Africa to western China, and insisted that the traditions inside it are not fixed objects but things in constant movement.

The records

The catalogue runs to more than thirty-eight albums of original compositions and his own arrangements of melodies collected on the road. The later run is the easiest entry point: The Other Side in 2014, the Cretan-song record Την άνοιξη περίμενες in 2015 made with the singers Vasilis and Mitsos Stavrakakis, Όσοι χαρ'χούν τα πουλιά in 2016, and Lunar in 2017 with Kelly Thoma. Earlier work includes the duo record AN-KI with the Iranian percussionist Djamshid Chemirani and ΠΝΟΗ with the clarinettist Vassilis Soukas — pairings that show the thing he is most often credited with, which is getting musicians from traditions with no obvious common ground to play together without flattening either side.

Much of the back catalogue now sits on his own Bandcamp page rather than with a label. In 2012 he received the European Citizen's Prize, awarded by the European Parliament.

Where he stands now

The most substantial recent chapter was in Canada. Through November 2025 Daly and Thoma joined the Toronto-based Labyrinth Ensemble — a thirteen-piece group drawn from the Ontario offshoot of the Houdetsi project, running as a non-profit since 2017 — for a seven-stop southern Ontario tour. It opened at the Aga Khan Museum's Nanji Family Foundation Auditorium on 8 November 2025 and ran through Bancroft, Midland, Peterborough's Sadleir House on 14 November, Glebe-St. James United Church in Ottawa on 15 November and two Mississauga dates, closing at Erin Mills United Church on 21 November. The players had been through four years of intensive training and were in their seventh intensive; the tour was framed as that cohort's graduation. The line-up pulled santur, gayageum, tanbur, kemençe, contrabass and lyra into one group, which is the Labyrinth idea working in practice rather than in a brochure.

Back in Greece, Daly and Thoma made their first appearance at the Theatre of the No, a small industrial room north of Omonia Square in Athens, on 8 January 2026 — 21:00, tickets at €12. They returned on 25 April 2026 for two shows at 18:00 and 20:00, both of which sold out, with Thomas Meleteas on oud and Maro Panagi on percussion. The National Herald's write-up of that night described roughly two hours in near-darkness and an audience held in it rather than entertained by it.

Since then the diary has been duo work across three continents' worth of small rooms: Istanbulimpro in Kadıköy on 18 June 2026, Milan on 30 August 2026, and the two Athens nights now on sale. The Irish Echo profiled him on 8 July 2026, at 74, still teaching at Houdetsi and still booking festivals, with nothing in the schedule suggesting a wind-down.

The duo as a format

The current touring unit is the one that has carried most of his work for a decade: Daly and Thoma, two lyras facing each other. Thoma has studied with him since 1995 and has travelled with Labyrinth ever since, which means the two of them can take a mode apart on stage without a rhythm section to hold the shape. Where the budget and the room allow, oud and percussion come in. Where they do not, two instruments and twenty-two sympathetic strings are the whole production.