Music: 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...