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Month: January 2011
Vamvakaris: The flood
In the previous post, I wrote about the 1933 recording A raid on the hashish den, a comedy sketch with music, featuring one of the earliest recordings of Markos Vamvakaris. In the process, I got the bug for GoAnimate, and so I created an animated music video for the song. (Now with subtitles.) My second […]
A raid on the hashish den
Among Markos Vamvakaris’ 1933 recordings—among his very earliest, that is—is Έφοδος στον τεκέ, “A raid on the hashish den”. This was a musical revue number by Giannis Kamvysis and Petros Kyriakos. Kyriakos was a musical theatre actor, and the underworld that gave rise to rebetiko music was part of what he documented in song. With […]
Markos Vamvakaris: Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο
Rebetiko music was a fusion of styles, and the fusion can be seen in progress through the ’30s. The antecedents of rebetiko are murky, but the most visible antecedent is Smyrneika, the music of Anatolian cafés, which came with the Anatolian refugees to Greece in the ’20s, and was taken up as the emblem of […]