An Athenian Diary

17

 

Greek Music

 

When I was in Greece last time I paid virtually no attention to the music -- I listened exclusively to the US music I and others had brought with us. A big mistake I have always regretted. This time I've made an effort to attend to at least some of the music the Greeks are listening to now. Here's some observations, random, no claim to completeness, a purely personal selection of artists and songs.

 

Music! What's more human, easier to share across cultures than music? You don't even need to know the words to appreciate the sounds, the rhythms, the pulse, the excitement. Greek music is way too full for me even to begin to say anything authoritative about it; there are people who've spent their lives studying and elucidating it (I have provided some links to web sites where some of this information can be found below). The best I can do is tell you what I've learned and share with you what I like. So if you're ready to explore. . . . Let's start by hearing some music! (Photo on the left borrowed from Edie's night out back in November.)

 

One place you can go to hear some older music is Greek Songs, an archive of an amazing number of traditional songs. To hear a bit of two of Elli Kokkinou's songs, click here for Masai and Kalokairi, both off "Sto Kokkinou." There is also an excellent discussion of Greek music in Greece. The Rough Guide, by Marc Dubin and George Pissalides, from which I have learned a lot.

 

    Traditional Greek Music

 

This category is large. Let's start with rembetika. This style of music originated with the Greeks who were relocated to Greece after the disastrous Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, which ended with the destruction of Smyrna, one of the great international cities of the nineteenth century. Smyrna had been a thriving center of Greek culture (in the late Ottoman empire, be it noted) -- it had the best educational system in Greek (far in advance of anything in the country of Greece) and a vibrant popular culture. This culture included a local style of music, played with the bouzouki. The refugees who came to Greece after 1922 brought this tradition with them; it developed further in Thessalonike and especially the Peiraieus of Athens (and, so I have read, nurtured and appreciated especially in hashish cafes). Today it has a very long history and many practitioners.

 

"The Widow" is a classic rembetiko song, whose origins definitely go back to Smyrna before the war. The version I know is by Antonakis Zoulas, slow and painful: "The pillow of the widow / smells of lemon / and whoever gets involved with a widow / sells his youth into slavery." Why? "The widow makes her bed in the evening / and the morning; she sleeps / and at daybreak / she remembers her husband."

 

Another rembetiko standard is "The Net." Unlike "The Widow," this song can be attributed: the words are by Nikos Gmatsos and the music by Stauros Zarhakos. "Whenever you open a road into your life / Don't wait for midnight to find you / Keep your eyes open evening and morning / Because everywhere in front of you stretches out a net."

 

Athens has lots of rembetiko clubs around town, some of which have been operating for a long time. Now that it's illegal to smash plates, these places are rather calmer than in the olden days, and some (inevitably) have come to specialize in tourism, filled now with Japanese and Germans.

 

A good example of a traditional song -- but not rembetiko -- with bouzouki appeared in a classic Greek film, Stella, starring Melina Merkouri at the start of her career. Merkouri played a nightclub singer (see skiladaki, below) who wanted independence; her lover, whom she did truly love, insisted on her stopping work after marriage -- a return to the traditional. Her refusal consisted in seeking out a one-night stand, which she then told her lover about without the slightest trace of regret or shame -- and he then killed her. She sings "Love, You Have Become," whose lyrics express her own dilemma: "Love, you have become / a two-edged knife / Sometimes you give me only joy / But now you're strangling / the joy in tears," etc. The metaphor sounds more mixed in English!

 

You can learn a whole lot more about rembetika by visiting Matt Barrett's Rembetika and Greek Popular Music site.

 

    Modern Popular Greek Music

 

There is a thriving industry today in Greek pop music that mixes elements borrowed from traditional forms -- instruments, themes, melodies, styles of singing -- with elements from rock and other forms of "Western" popular music to create what may be a new form. I love the variety and unexpectedness of a lot of this music -- a single CD may bear anything from songs virtually traditional to virtually rock. For me, the most powerful practitioners are the cadre of women singers around Phoibos Tassopoulos, a reclusive songwriter (the son, I am told, of a famous Greek writer) who rarely appears and uses only his first name (but I have ferreted out his last!); he has written hits for almost everyone.

 

Elli Kokkinou had a big hit this past summer with "Auto to kalokairi" ("This Summer"), a paean to sun, surf, and summer love (with lines like "I promise you this summer will be one of the best for us, baby / With the colors of the sea I'll paint our partnership of love, like my dream" -- you get the idea). It's got a great summer beat -- puts to shame, in my view, "Soak Up the Sun" by Sheryl Crow, which was being touted back in the USA in June (2003) as a new "classic" summer song. Elli's forte is love, with a tough female edge; one of her songs, "Sorry," is cast as an absolutely unrepentant rejection of a lover because, well, "I've found a better boy." No doubt the image is helped by Elli's look -- she's what you call in Greek a kommatos (related to the word meaning "piece," but it doesn't have the same misogynist overtone that the English usage has -- it's more like "hot babe"), brimming red hair, big pouty eyes, and ample boobs spilling out of her dress. She's a singer of skiladika, says my first Greek teacher here, Maria -- that is, songs "of low quality" sung in "a popular night club" with "content especially concerning love" (meaning, of course, sex; definition from the great modern Greek dictionary of Babinotes). It's somewhat disreputable, it seems, among persons of class (such as I should be, by definition, as a professor of Greek history), to like Elli, but I do unabashedly -- which generates astonishment among some but admiration by the maids. Elli's got a new show at the Romeo, a pretty famous club here in Athens, which I will catch when I can stay up that late and report on.

 

Keti Garbi is another singer associated with Phoibos. I got to know her through her collection of older songs from earlier albums plus some new material, To Kati (The Thing), a great combination of rousing bouzouki-driven tunes, quieter ballads, and some political songs. Keti's got a new album out called Insistent Ideas which isn't quite as good in my view, but still deserves listening. Keti's image is a bit more reserved than Elli's, but for my money she's probably the best singer of the group. And you have to respect anybody who'd post a publicity picture wearing glasses. (Doesn't that picture to the left look like something wholesome out of some 1960s teenage movie before the Beatles hit America? And with her glasses on -- below, right -- she looks like Agent 99.) Keti has of course a fan club (only in Greek) and now an official web page.

 

It turns out -- Athens is a small place in some ways still, see below -- that Nikos, one of the IT people here at the American School, knows Keti. The best man at Nikos's wedding runs a recording studio in Athens where Keti has worked; through him Nikos has gotten to be friends with her, and he and his wife have gone out with Keti.

 

I first heard Anna Vissi on a live album called "An Evening with Zoom," which has some songs I really liked and others that didn't quite so much move me. I later bought her newest, Strange Images, in the Plaka (surely a pirate -- 5 euros for a double CD). It's not quite as good, I think -- rather too pop (is she trying to find an audience outside Greece?), too little bouzouki, particularly on the first disk. The second disk is better by far in my view, because on it she goes back to her roots in traditional Greek popular music. A recent issue of Athenorama, one of the local weekly guides to doings in Athens, says of Anna, "still the queen." She's got a show going on now at the Diogenes Studio A; the picture used as the cover for her latest album, looking sultry (to the left; you can be the judge) was plastered all over Athens for months, but has now largely disappeared. She was, born, by the way, on December 20, 1957, on Cyprus -- you do the math. She recently celebrated her homeland's entry into the EU with a free outdoor concert in Nikosia. Her Fan Club has a sophisticated web site. You can read a short bio on Ask Men.

 

Natasa Theodoridou has perhaps the best reputation these days among women Greek singers of her class. She probably sits a bit higher on the ladder of respectability than Elli Kokkinou and her ilk. She did the music for the wildly popular film Politike Kouzina and is now on a new tour here in Athens (more on this below). She's not so much to my taste -- a bit too cloying for me, not feisty enough.

 

As in America, some of the best work appears here too in soundtracks. I especially like Nikos Portokaloglou's Brazilero, done for a film by Sotiris Goritsas. The film's about an investigation into what happened to an EU loan to a Greek small-town businessman; the music links in to the film in important ways (or so I've read -- I confess to not having seen the movie). The music has a variety and texture that's lacking in some popular Greek music, I will admit.

 

It would be unfair -- and protested by millions to Greeks -- to omit in a discussion like this any mention of Alexis Hariou, who is probably the best-loved contemporary vocalist in Greece. No singer of skiladika, she focuses instead on soulful, passionate songs, ballads mostly, to feature her expressive voice. I have to confess that she just doesn't move me like she's supposed to -- she's a bit too maudlin, a bit too lacking in irony and edge, for my tastes. There's a good collection of her songs on "Around the World," a recent set of live performances recorded in Greece, Israel, Canada, and elsewhere.

 

Phoibos Delibortas doesn't fit so obviously in any category, and as so often, the fun, up-beat, catchy, and optimistic hit, "She Who's Passing By," from his latest album, The Mirror, doesn't sound much like the other songs from the album. It's got a great video, filmed obviously on a shoesting here in Athens, with a beautiful woman followed around by men melting with love, whom she scornfully ignores -- even when they all fall on their knees simultaneously to propose. But who could resist a song whose hero is attracted to the woman in part because she's carrying a bag from Eleutherodakis -- the biggest bookstore in Athens? That means, she's a reader! Alas, who in American popular music falls for a girl because he thinks she's smart?

 

Another album I've recently come to enjoy is Dimitris Koryialas' As' ta dyskola se mena, "Leave the Difficult Things to Me."

 

The other night we were watching Mad-TV, the Greek MTV, and heard a great song called "Ola einai entaxi" by Nikos Karvelas -- and I ran out to buy the album, even though the kids hated the song (or so they claimed). "Everything's Okay" is the best song on the album, but Nikos has a nice range and an irony sensibility (as in the song "My Dog's Gay"). He is, however, basically a rocker, not a traditional Greek singer -- he's somebody who relies on guitar, bass, and drums more than bouzouki, and who'll happily import an American rapper to add some trans-Atlantic flavor to a song like "The Prophylatic" or borrow heavily -- and effectively -- from Carlos Santana on "Boro" ("I Can"). But that's not to be held against him!

 

   Reaching the Fans -- Live!

 

In the US, with its huge market, we are used to "live touring" meaning that a band or singer shows up in town for one, or maybe two, nights to give a concert, and then moves on to the next locale. I remember how radical it seemed when bands like The Grateful Dead would book Madison Square Garden in New York for a whole week. The market here works in a completely different way. For instance, in early December Elli started a gig at the Romeo, a club here in Athens. There she (and a bevy of lesser lights) performs every night except Mondays and Tuesdays, for weeks on end. The others do the same; right now there's an abundance of music on offer in Athens, as Keti plays the Rex, Anna Vissi the Diogenes Studio A, etc. Greece is too small to require touring in our sense, and anyway, a third of the population of the whole country lives here (see Everybody's Happy All the Time); you can reach an enormous percentage of your fans by staying in one place. I also have the feeling -- no evidence yet to support it -- that the "stars" here are less remote and more accessible than in the US. Certainly, I suspect my chances of running into Elli on the street are considerably better than would be my chances with Brittany back home (okay, perhaps this is fantasy at work here!). But in any case, as Edie and I were saying the other day, the whole scene feels more like the regional market that used to thrive in Chicago with Steve Goodman and Bonnie Koloc than the big-time pan-US market that dominates everything today. (After all, the total population of Greece isn't that much greater than that of metropolitan Chicago). 

 

In the end, despite best intentions, I never made it out to one of those painfully late night Greek shows. But for a wonderful description of what a Greek nightclub show is like see Edie's Thanksging Night at the Bouzoukia, featuring Giorgos Daskoulides, who's had some big hits in Greece recently.

 

 

   Some Thoughts on Listening to Greek Music

 

As with literature, having learned enough Greek to begin to appreciate the music (which is an easier task with music), I have come to realize that there is a whole world here which remains utterly impenetrable to almost everyone who's not Greek. The singers I have discussed -- and there are many, many more -- have, so far as I can see, no interest in "reaching out" beyond the Greek audience. I am sure that all of them could, if they wanted to, sing in English, and expand instantly by many times their potential audience (the mediocre ones are at least as good as the big US pop stars like Brittany Spears, and the best -- for me probably Keti, followed in her best songs by Elli -- easily better). But they seem committed to, and content with, the audience they have. I suspect that even the poppiest of them, with smalzy violins and overwrought vocalizations (Anna, I am sorry to report, in too many of her newest songs), see themselves as belonging to that tradition of Greek music that insists on its origins in the tavernas of Smyrna, that would not be Greek music without the ring of the bouzouki. And this would surely vanish, or largely disappear, if they left the language for English. So I say, good for them. The pity is that so few outsiders will come to appreciate what is, I think, a creative and vibrant and fun music, with its undisguised interest in sex and love and betrayal, delivered up in its best incarnations with verve and irony and energy. But better that the majority of the world miss out -- and indeed, how many wonderful things must there be about which I know nothing, and will never know anything? -- than that by compromise the energy and life should vanish from this vibrant culture?

 

These reflections were deepened by a recent week in Turkey, where I heard lots of Turkish popular music, and bought a tape of songs by Hilal Celebi called Yükselme Zaman2 -- roughly, "Time to Rise." The vocals, instrumentation, melodies, and indeed even the composers -- for who should show up in the credits but Phoebus Tassopoulos? -- could have come straight off a Greek CD, except of course for the language. If she were Greek Hilal would be a classic skiladaki, as you can judge not just from her songs, about betrayal in love, but also from the cover art on her tape.

 

   Some Internet Resources (mostly in English)

 

Yannis K. Ioannou's Greek Music Today website is packed with information about music and singers (but somewhat selectively, as some of my favorites aren't there; still, you'll learn a lot).

 

For an archive of 6000+ older Greek songs, try Greek Songs.

 

There's an interview with the Greek singer Glykeria that appeared in the Kathimerini for February 17, 2004, in which she offers some trenchant opinions about the course of Greek popular music in the last few decades.

 

The radio station Antenna 97.5 has a site devoted to the "greatest Greek singers." Antenna is a top-10 style station, so beware -- but they do list good folks!

 

December 1, 2003-October 10, 2004

 

 

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