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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZREMBETIKAAccompanied song style built on long Byzantine, Turkish, Greek tradition, emerging in urban Greece in the 1920s. After the Turko-Greek war ended '22, Turks living in Greece and Greeks in Asia Minor were repatriated; returning Greeks lived in seaport towns like Piraeus, regarded as low-caste, unwelcome outsiders (called 'mages', 'rembetes' because of distinctive style of dress and behaviour): they lived on the fringe in a life of petty crime, and brought a Turkish culture of music, dance and hashish. Accompanied by baglama (a small bouzouki), jail songs were mixed with established café aman style ('aman' meaning improvisation) and an incoming more decorative Turkish or smyrna style. Lyrics were marked by contempt for the world at large and for authority, a sensual response to the moment and disregard for the future: aided by hashish the singer sought to transcend his circumstances in a mood of 'meraki'. Themes included comradeship, release from pain and trouble via the narghile (hookah pipe), familiarity with and indifference to death. Accompaniment of baglama or bouzouki later increased to band of several bouzoukis; audience danced dances called hasapiko, tsifteteli, zembekiko. The style flourished '30-40s (records were made '30s in the USA); became bland in the '50s and was revived in the late '70s as young Greeks turned to their own popular culture with the end of the junta. Important singers/writers were Vassilis Tsitsanis, Markos Vamvakaris, Rosa Eskenazi, Sotiria Bellou. There were six volumes of The History Of Rembetika on Columbia/EMI; also Historic Urban Folk: Songs From Greece on Rounder; 13 CDs on FM Records in series The Greek Archives: The Rembetiko Song In America 1920-1940; 1945-1960 (two volumes); Armenians, Jews, Turks And Gypsies In Old Recordings; Songs Of Outlaws; etc. A series of interviews with Markos Vamvakaris in 1969 has been published as The Man And The Bouzouki, edited and traslated by Noonie Minogue. He spent his life in the company of riffraff, wrote reviewer Alexander Clapp in the TImes Literary Supplement (for February 5 2016), complained about bouzouki imposters entertaining the tourist invasion of the 1960s, and provides a glimpse of "that raw, proletarian Greece of the interwar years". |