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REBETIKA – A BRIEF HISTORY
by Ed Emery*
From about the 1850s, in the side
streets of Asia Minor’s Smyrna, the popular quarters of Istanbul, the back
alleys of the port of Siros and the working-class areas of Athens, Piraeus and
Thessaloniki – not to mention the United States, and all parts of the world
where emigré Greeks had flocked in their thousands – a new music began to be
created: popular song, and the style of song that we now call rebetika. It spread rapidly. First among
the Greeks of Asia Minor, then in emigré communities in the US, and finally –
after 1922 – on the Greek mainland.
Rebetika reached the height of its
popularity between the two world wars. It was standard musical fare in clubs
and bars and featured largely in the discography of 78 rpm records that were
produced in Greece and the US at that time.
The support enjoyed by rebetika at
the popular level was not matched among the arbiters of morality and cultural
values. The music was heavily censored in the 1930s. But the censorship did not
kill rebetika; far from it. Immediately after the Second World War it witnessed
a major boom in Greece, which lasted through to the mid-1950s. A boom explained
in part, perhaps, by the sufferings and social upheavals caused by the Civil
War and in part by the economic pressures that contributed to the growth of
urban centres such as Athens and Thessaloniki.
During the past twenty years all the
main exponents of rebetika – the heirs of the singers and composers who came from
Asia Minor after the military disaster of 1922 – have died. They have left
behind a wealth of recordings, which are slowly being collected and catalogued
by rebetologists. In the meantime new generations of singers and players are
emerging, to keep the tradition alive. Not only in Greece, but in Greek
communities in the US, Britain, Australia and elsewhere, there are clubs where
the old songs are sung and enjoyed and where a tradition of new songs is being
forged.
The purpose of this introduction is
to sketch some of the background and history of rebetiko music.
Greece and
the Greeks
Greece today is a country of more or
less fixed borders, on the Mediterranean, between Italy and Turkey. A member of
NATO and the European Union. A country with a strong national identity,
reinforced by its distinctively non-accessible language and alphabet and its
all-pervasive Orthodox religion. But even today the borders of Greece are
subject to pressure and liable to erosion – the general threat of Turkey’s
military might; specific Turkish pressures in the Aegean and on the eastern
mainland; pressure from the proponents of a ‘Greater Albania’; and the recent
emergence of Macedonia as an independent state to the north.
More importantly, Greece is
Diaspora, scattered all across the world, as communities of political refugees
and economic migrants. Since the days of Alexander the Great there have been
Greek communities found throughout Asia. In the past century Greeks have
migrated as far afield as Australia and the United States. And the past fifty
years have seen large-scale migrations within Europe itself. Greeks, and their
communities, are to be found more or less everywhere. In a very real sense, as
much as a fixed geopolitical entity, Greece is an ‘imagined community’.
And, despite the best efforts of
Greek nationalists to prove the contrary, Greece is a bastard culture. A rich
and complex admixture of cultural elements deriving from far and wide. It is
precisely for this reason that, through the various periods of flag-waving
Greek nationalism, rebetika has proved such a reference point for dissident
spirits. It is fiercely transgressive; it flies in the face of accepted
moralities and legalities; but it too is a bastard culture par excellence. A
complex coming-together of musical modes and rhythms, combined with a
distinctive argot that borrows from all the languages of the Mediterranean
seaboard.
A shifting,
changing entity
As regards
its formal borders, the original Greek state, carved out of a 400-year
subjugation to the Ottoman empire, was established in 1832 by the Convention of
London. In 1864 the Ionian islands (Corfu, etc) were annexed and in 1881
Thessaly and part of Epirus were added. During the First World War other
territories were taken from Turkey and added to Greece – the rest of Epirus,
Macedonia, Western Thrace, Crete and the islands of the eastern Aegean. Perhaps
the most significant outcome of the First World War was the 1920 Treaty of
Sèvres, which gave Greece the right to occupy Eastern Thrace, but also the
hinterland of Smyrna (present-day Izmir, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast).
Directly from this derived what Greeks call the ‘Asia Minor catastrophe’ (see
note 7 below). Subsequently, in 1948, the islands of the Dodecanese were also
annexed to Greece.
As regards
the diaspora, Greeks were to be found wherever there was trade. They are, after all,
a major maritime nation. In the 1790s a Greek was mayor of Moscow (a relative
of mine, as it happens). In 1815 the newly founded (and revolutionary) Greek
Friendly Society had active branches in Moscow, Bucharest and Trieste, as well
as all the major cities of the Levant. By the turn of the century, outside
Greece itself the major urban centres with Greek populations were Smyrna,
Istanbul and Alexandria, and within Greece, Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus,
Patras and Ermoupolis (the port of the island of Siros). Furthermore, prior to
1922, there were upwards of 1,000 Greek communities living in Anatolia (Asia
Minor), in what is now Turkey, from Cappadocia to Trebizond.
The population shifts and migrations
were many-fold and all contributed to the great magmatic, largely urbanized,
multinational conglomerate which now constitutes ‘Greekness’.
As regards
Athens,
in 1834 the city became the capital of the newly formed Greek state. In that
year its population was a mere 10,000. By 1920 it had grown to reach 285,000
and a mere eight years later, thanks to the massive influx of Greek refugees,
it stood at 453,000. By 1980 it had risen to 3 million, out of a total national
population of 9 million – in other words, a third of the population of Greece
lived in Athens. A similar industrialization and population growth affected the
other sea ports, especially Thessaloniki, which was a rail terminal and trading
outlet for the landlocked countries of the Balkans.
This phenomenon of urbanization,
with country populations moving into cities, went hand in hand with an outward
migration. Over the 30-year period 1893–1924, the United States drew in the
labour-power of 500,000 Greeks, from a country whose total population was
2,500,000. And after the Second World War Greeks emigrated to Western Europe in
their thousands, some looking for work in labour-hungry states such as Germany,
others seeking to escape the constraints of Fascist–Orthodox Greece and find
new freedoms – for instance in Paris, where some of today’s rebetologists were
among the students of May ’68, and Italy, where the universities had a massive
presence of Greeks throughout the 1970s.
Setting the
scene
To give an idea of the social
ambience in which rebetika originated, we have the following picture provided
by Lysandros Pitharas, who made an excellent documentary on rebetika for
British television:
It’s 1935, in a working-class bar on
the Athenian waterfront. From the outside, the bar looks like a ramshackle hut,
but inside, the atmosphere is furious. In air thick with the smoke of narcotics
and incense, a small band sits on a stage. The lead bouzouki-player – eyes half
shut – plays a lingering solo (taxim)
to shouts of ‘aman... ’. Suddenly,
the other players thump their feet and begin playing a harsh, incessant rhythm,
with the singer’s voice rasping:
Stash up my weed, sister,
Go get some weed,
When we’re stoned together,
A bouzouki’s all I need.
ÔóïíôÜñçó’ áäåñöïýëá ìïõ
Íá ðéïýìå ôóéìðïõêÜêé
Ìáæß íá ìáóôïõñéÜóïõìå,
Íá ðáßî’ ôï ìðïõæïõêÜêé.
(Markos Vamvakaris, Alaniaris, 1935)
The crowd, made up of poor people,
mostly men, roars its approval. One of them, hat cocked to one side and jacket
hanging from one arm, rises to the floor. Eyes shut and body swaying, he
dances, bringing his hand now to his forehead, now to the ground, all the time
beating the rhythm of the music with the soles of his shoes. This is the dance
of the mangas [spiv], a dance known
as the zeibekiko. The music he is
dancing to is rebetika – a Greek blues... 1
The meaning
and derivation of ‘rebetika’
Like all subculture musics, rebetika
poses difficulties of classification. And these difficulties begin even with
the meaning and derivation of the word ‘rebetika’ itself. Individual
rebetologists each have their own explanations, duly averred, and if one is
true then it follows that the others, equally firmly asserted, are not. What
follows is merely a selection:
The most likely derivation is rembet, an old Turkish word meaning ‘of
the gutter’.
Some people claim that it derives
from the Serb word rebenòk (pl. rebia’ta), which means ‘rebel’.
The Turks called their irregular
troops rebet asker. Thus the rebèts were people who would not submit
to authority.
It very probably derives from the
Persian and Arabic root reb, rab, ruba‘a
or arba‘a, which mean four. In the plural form ruba‘at or arba‘at mean
fours but also quatrains... In Arabic, rab
also means God and Lord...
The word may have its roots in the
Hebrew rab, from which the word rabbi
is derived.
The word rembetiko is a corruption
of the archaic and also modern term remvastikos
(meditative) and is derived from the verb remvo
or remvazo, which means ‘I wander’...
literally... and in the figurative sense of ‘my mind is wandering in an anxious
mood’.
The strongest assertion as to
rebetika’s historical origins, and perhaps the most suggestive for us, is the
following, by the late Ole Smith of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Having studied a recent discography of pre-Second World War ethnic recordings
in the US, he says:
It is now possible to give a much
more balanced view of the emergence of the term ‘rebetiko’, which can be shown beyond doubt [my
emphasis] to have made its first public appearance as a musical term among
Greeks in the US... It is now absolutely clear that the term was first used in
print in the United States, and that the first to have songs characterized as
‘rebetiko’ must have been Marika Papagika, who recorded a ‘rebetiko’ at least
before December 1926. This was the song ÓìõñíéÜ on Greek Record Co. 511. [... ]
At present we cannot say why the songs were called ‘rebetika’.2
The social
setting of rebetika
What we can say is that rebetika was
the music of the rebetes. So now the
question is, ‘Who were the rebetes?’, in the sense of the people who lived and
created the songs and music of rebetika. The present book is an attempt to
provide the answer to that question. But I would like to begin by sketching the
elements of the broader social and musical setting.
In the rapid growth of population on
the Greek mainland from 1850 onwards, there was a large migration to the
cities. In part, this was made up of people leaving the countryside. In part,
it was the massive arrival of refugee Greeks from various parts of the diaspora
community.3 From Russia after the Revolution... from Pontus and the
shores of the Black Sea... and from that part of Asia Minor (Smyrna in
particular) which is now Turkey. From Asia Minor alone, in 1922–23, an
estimated 1,500,000 Greeks arrived on the Greek mainland as refugees.
The effect of these forced
migrations was to shatter the previously existing social and economic
structures of Greece. Classes and hierarchies that had existed in the diaspora
communities were turned topsy-turvy in the bedlam of flight and the ensuing
struggle for survival. There was no housing to accommodate the newcomers and
little health or education provision. Unemployment was the rule, since jobs
could not be created out of nothing, and the incoming refugees faced the
additional pressures of racism.
So the violent break-up of
traditional social structures was accompanied by another violence, in the ways
in which social spaces and living conditions were organized for the newly
arrived migrants. Large slum communities, shanty towns, grew up around the big
cities, Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki chief among them. They were
characterized by poverty, unemployment, rootlessness, homelessness, police
oppression, social deprivation, prostitution, criminality and drugs.
The transition, from 1832 onwards,
from a rural to an urban-based economy brought into being a new form of song –
the urban song – in the same way that, in the US, the blues songs of the
countryside developed into ‘urban blues’ when black labour-power was drawn into
jobs in the cities. Within this generic urban song, the distinctive style that
we now know as rebetika began to emerge.
It was a musical sub-culture, a
music of the lower classes. And this we could call the first phase of rebetika.
Petropoulos explains:
The womb of rebetika was the jail
and the hash den. It was there that the early rebetes created their songs. They
sang in quiet, hoarse voices, unforced, one after the other, each singer adding
a verse which often bore no relation to the previous verse, and a song often
went on for hours. There was no refrain, and the melody was simple and easy.
One rebetis accompanied the singer with
a bouzouki or a baglamas [a smaller
version of the bouzouki, very portable, easy to make in prison and easy to hide
from the police], and perhaps another, moved by the music, would get up and
dance. The early rebetika songs, particularly the love songs, were based on
Greek folk songs and the songs of the Greeks of Izmir and Istanbul.4
In the large urban ghettos that had
developed around Greece’s major cities the social upheaval was immense:
In Piraeus, the port of Athens, tens
of thousands of unemployed people inhabited these ghettos, where their only
livelihood was petty crime, smuggling and odd jobs. In the tough life of the
city a new urban sub-culture held sway, with their own dialects, codes of dress
and ways of life – that of the manges.
At night they gathered in hashish dens to hear the new music that by the turn
of the century had transformed the bouzouki into a symbol of their urban
pride...5
The dynamics of this urban song were
transformed utterly by the arrival of the Asia Minor (Anatolian) refugees
post-1922. This was in fact a two-way population transfer, agreed under the
terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne: Greek-speaking Turks from the present
entity of Greece were shipped en masse to Turkey, and Greeks from what is now
Turkey were shipped to Greece (many of them in the face of murder, rape and
torture at the hands of the Turks, intent on repeating their massacre of the
Armenians). These migrant Greeks brought with them a musical culture that
transformed the rebetiko song tradition.6
The cataclysmic Smyrna catastrophe
was crucial to rebetika history.7 After a futile war, one and a half
million Anatolian Greek refugees suddenly poured into the Greek cities and
inflated the problems of the urban poor to breaking point. The music that the
refugees brought with them was at first very different to that of the manges.
It was oriental. Their clarinets, violins, santouris
(hammer dulcimers) and kanonakia
(zithers) vied with the bouzouki-players for the attention of the urban poor.
In a 1993 interview, Mikis
Theodorakis (Greece’s best-known composer, who shifted from being a communist
dissident to becoming a conservative minister) outlines the process involved in
this transformation of rebetiko song. First he describes the long-standing
folk-music tradition and the Byzantine hymnology, with its roots reaching back
to classical Greece. He talks first about modes, then about the strong Italian
influence, and then about the incursion of tonal music into the Greek world of
modal music:
Rebetiko music is based on musical modes – it is a modal music – whereas the music of urban songs is tonal. Modal music had its origins in
the modes of the ancient world. In ancient Greek music, the modes were a series
of eight descending sounds which were characterized by different orderings of
tones and semi-tones. There were three main modes – the Dorian, the Phrygian
and the Lydian – but there were also others, such as the Ionian, the
Mixolydian, the Hypophrygian, etc. In fact Plato himself, in his Republic, distinguishes between Western
and oriental music, between the Ionian and the Dorian, and says that oriental
music should be rejected...
Both these modes passed into Greek
popular song – and also into Arabic and Turkish music. Byzantine scales also
had a great influence on Turkish and Arabic music – and the Byzantine scales
were based on the Dorian, Ionian, Aeolian scales, etc...
Theodorakis then describes the
musical revolution that took place in Europe under the Enlightenment, with the
advent of the tempered scale, which made harmony possible – whereas in Greek,
Turkish and Arabic folk song the music is isophonic, or without harmony.
However, rebetiko song significantly
remained within the modal tradition,
which is characteristically oriental and ultimately derives from classical
Greece. It is a music which is paradoxically, challengingly, strikingly at odds
with the Western musical tradition, which partly explains why it is so enticing
to the European ear. Theodorakis continues:
So, at the end of the nineteenth
century and the start of the twentieth, Greek folk song was predominantly modal. In the Ionian islands, on the
other hand, because of the Italian connection and trade with the rest of
Europe, the tonal revolution had made
a breakthrough, in the form of serenades...
But then the refugees arrived from
Asia Minor, bringing with them a music that was basically Turkish...
At this time, the bourgeoisie, on
the other hand, was influenced by tonal music, European music. On the island of
Siros, and in Patras and Smyrna, they already had lyric theatre, musical review
shows and operetta, brought from Europe via the merchants. The bourgeoisie were
humming the tunes of Italian opera.
But the ordinary folk loved and sang
Turkish music, with Turkish words, and rebetika, with words in Greek, because
these gentle melodies were more in tune with their bitter experiences of life
[...] The chosen instruments of the rebetes were the bouzouki and the baglamas
(the latter because it was small and could be easily concealed), and these were
the instruments played in the prisons... These were men of great sensitivity,
who lived in city environments, and whose state of mind could not be expressed
in the serenades of the islands, nor in the imported European music, nor in
folk song, nor in the Byzantine hymns and the music of the Church. But their
feelings could be expressed fully in
the rebetika and the bouzouki...8
To this Costas Ferris adds a note
about the role of Giovanikas:
The great explosion and development
of rebetika came with the growing popularity of the Smyrnean Minore mode (also
known as the ‘Minore of the Dawn’), which was created towards the end of the
nineteenth century by the violinist Giovanikas. Born in Wallachia (Romania), he
lived in Mytilene, Constantinople, Smyrna, and often toured in free Greece.
Giovanikas, who had a classical musical culture as well as knowing a lot of
traditional island music, had the brilliant idea of combining gypsy (Balkan)
polyphonic (and thus ‘Western’) chords in the cymbalon, santouri or other
instruments, with the monophonic oriental Niavent dhromos mode in the melodic lines of the soloist singer or
violinist. This mating produced a vibrant combination of Western polyphony with
Byzantine and oriental monophony.9
Markos
Vamvakaris and the manges
Sociology apart, the social setting
of rebetika is perhaps best summed up in the figure of Markos Vamvakaris. In
the words of Lysandros Pitharas:
The 1930s were the Golden Years of
rebetika and the life and times of its most famous composer, Markos Vamvakaris,
gives a flavour of what this era was like. He was born in Syros in 1905. At the
age of eight he was already bored with working in factories; by the time he was
twelve he had been imprisoned for black marketeering. In 1920, when he was just
fifteen, Markos stowed away on a ship bound for Piraeus and started a new
chapter in his life.
On reaching the mainland, he found
work loading coal, but quickly discovered the underworld of this tough city. The
petty hoodlums and smugglers of the port soon became his friends and by his
late teens Markos’ companion was an older whore, and his life that of the tekkedes [hash dens].
Markos had two great loves in his
life – smoking hashish and bouzouki. It was not long before he started to
become known as a mangas. The nearest English equivalent to the term mangas is
wide boy, or spiv. The culture of the manges was so underworld that even Greeks
disagree about what they were. Generally, they were twilight characters living
on the edge of the law. Many of them spoke their own street dialect (koutsavakika) and dressed with a
streetwise swagger (hats, spats, suits). They were involved in the petty crimes
of the ghettos, often carrying knives. These were the characters behind the
most underworld themes of rebetika – the songs about smuggling, prison and so
on.
By 1933 Markos had won their
admiration with his music. He had teamed up with two Asia Minor refugees,
Stratos and Artemis, and a fourth musician mangas called Batis. They were the
most popular rebetika band to win a wide following all over Athens with songs
like Ime alaniaris... [I’m a wide
boy... ]:
I’m a wide boy wandering
the streets,
So stoned I don’t
recognize anyone I meet.
Åßìáé áëáíéÜñçò,
Óôïýò äñüìïõò êáß ãõñßæù
Êé áð’ ôçí ðïëëÞ ìáóôïýñá
ìïõ
ÊáíÝíá äå ãíùñßæù.
(Markos Vamvakaris, Alaniaris, 1935)
But life was cruel to the mangas.
Markos’ brother, for instance, died of a drug overdose early in the 1930s. His
second brother became a knife-carrying thug, spending most of his life in
prison. Artemis too died in 1943 from a drug overdose, an event he prophesied
in the most famous rebetiko junkie song, The
Junkie’s Lament:
From the time I started
to smoke the dose,
The world turned its back
on me.
I don’t know what to do.
From sniffing it up I
went onto the needle,
And my body began to
melt...
Áð’ ôüí êáéñü ðïý Üñ¸éóá
ôÞí ðñÝæá íÜ öïõìÜñù
Ï êüóìïò ì’ áðáñíÞèçêå,
äÝí îÝñù ôß íÜ êÜíù
Áð’ ôßò ìõôéÝò ðïý
ôñÜâáãá Üñ¸éóá êáß âåëüíé
Êáß ôü êïñìß ìïõ Üñ¸éóå
óéãÜ-óéãÜ íÜ ëéþíåé.
(Kostis, Apo tote pou archisa, 1910, recorded
again by A. Delias, 1934)
The social
acceptability of rebetika
Rebetika had its travails. As a
musical form, it was banned by the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936. The rebetika
musicians became targets for arrest and victimization by the authorities.
Tekkedes were frequently raided, and if people were caught singing rebetika (or
indeed playing the bouzouki), they were likely to be taken for dissolute
hash-smokers and shipped off to internal exile.
And the smoking of hashish was no
small part of rebetiko culture. In the Ottoman empire hashish had been freely
available and was openly smoked in cafes. In Greece too, for a period, people
smoked freely. The hash den was known as a tekkes
– from the Turkish tekke, meaning
dervish convent – and the rebetes who frequented these dens sometimes referred
to themselves as ‘dervishes’. Hashish cost virtually nothing and was a poor man’s
way of forgetting life’s troubles. There are songs aplenty celebrating the
smoking of hashish (in fact two Danish rebetologists have produced a whole book
of them, and a French company recently issued a record of hash-den songs.10
After the Second World War, however, they began to disappear. During the
Nazi–Fascist occupation of Greece no rebetika recordings were made – although
this is not to say that the songs were not sung.11
Vassilis Tsitsanis, one of the
greats of rebetika, was apparently singing songs featuring hashish right
through the period of Nazi occupation, but these could only be issued as
recordings after 1946, when the record factories reopened in Greece. Then, in
1947, censorship was reimposed and drug songs were again banned. That censorship
is still in force today – the law has never been repealed, and in theory the
words and music of all recordings must be submitted to the censor’s office
(although presently the law is not enforced). Rebetika was also attacked by the
Communist Party, for instance by Nikos Zachariades, who described it as the
music ‘of knife-fights and decadence’.
The first public sign of rebetika’s
emergence into respectability came in 1948, right in the midst of the
fratricidal war that was tearing Greece apart. One of the country’s leading
modern composers, Manos Hadzidakis, made a speech at a conference, defending
rebetika and claiming it as an integral part of the Greek musical heritage. Up
to that point the cultural elites had seen it as a music of criminal low-life,
sung and danced in prisons and dope dens, and linked to drugs, violence and
prostitution. Hadzidakis, albeit a conservative, claimed it as an authentic
music of the people, an art form of high musical quality and nobility. He also
pointed out that the taste for rebetika united all classes of Greeks, right
across a geographic spectrum that had previously been regionally divided. It
was – and this was a poignant moment in a country divided by civil war – a
unifying force between all Greeks.
Shortly afterwards, with the Civil
War ended, rebetika was ‘discovered’. It came out of its low-life backwaters
and into night clubs where rich people went. And at this point the character of
the music changed. The bouzouki went electric, everything went electric, and the
players began to perform for the upper bourgeoisie. Rebetika became a fashion.
You only have to see the photos of Giorgos Zambetas playing for the Kennedy
family and Aristotle Onassis to understand how far it had come from its humble
beginnings. The music became heavily commercialized – over-orchestrated, with
insipid lyrics – especially with the mass production of long-playing records in
Greece after 1955. The songs lost their edge, lost their pain and depth of
feeling. And the places where rebetiko music was played were among the most
expensive night clubs in Greece.
Smyrna
At this point we should go back a
couple of hundred years to look at what had been happening musically in Smyrna.
For Greeks the city was a little Greece, experienced emotionally as part of the
motherland. A rich trading port, it had an active harbour and a fertile
hinterland. And it had a flourishing musical life that was noted by travellers
even 300 years ago. The Frenchman Joseph Tournefort commented in 1702: ‘The
taverns [in Smyrna] are open at all hours of day and night. They play music,
they eat good food, they dance in the European, Greek and Turkish style... ’.
Another Frenchman, Bartholdy, observed:
For a Greek to dance, any time of
the day is suitable. The taverns in Smyrna and the other ports are continuously
filled with men drinking, dancing and singing. Even on the decks of their boats
they manage to find a bit of space where they can dance...
And in 1878 the folk-musicologist
Bourgault-Ducoudray wrote: ‘Smyrna is a very musical city. Nowhere have I seen
so many barrel-organs.’12
In the smart salons they sang romantses (a Spanish song-form) with
piano accompaniment. The ordinary folk had the ‘cafe-amans’, or musical cafes, which is where the dais13 would hang out, as described
by a Smyrniot poet whose name has not come down to us:
I am a dais, and when I dance the khasapiko, the ballo, the karsilamas and
the tsifteteli, with the sweet violin
of Giovanaki, all of Smyrna is proud of me.
I’m a dais, and ouzo is my god [...
] I have a good time, I dance, I drink and I get drunk, with santouris, and
violins, and drums.
What is important in all this is
that the musical life of Smyrna was both highbrow and lowbrow, both Italophile
and Turcophile, both East and West, and when the Greeks were driven out of that
city, they took their musical culture with them wholesale and transplanted it
onto the Greek mainland.
The musicians who came as refugees
were not just semi-skilled amateurs or street musicians:
The musicians, like most of the
other refugees, were, in comparison to the Greeks of the host country,
extremely sophisticated; many were highly educated, could read and compose
music, and had even been unionized in the towns of Asia Minor. It must have
been galling for them to live on the periphery of the new society in poverty
and degradation; most had lost all they had in the hasty evacuation, and many,
from inland Anatolia, could speak only Turkish. In their misery they sought
relief in another Ottoman institution, the tekés
or hashish den.14
Performers
and composers of rebetika
The original rebetiko music, as we
have said, derived from Asia Minor and was strongly Turkish in character. Here
we are talking about a distinct first
generation of rebetika composers and performers, most of whom derived from
Asia Minor – Panayiotis Tountas, Kostas Skarvelis, Evangelis Papazoglou, Yannis
Dragatsis, Kostas Karipis and Spyros Peristeris, all of whom were born between
1880 and 1895. By the 1920s there were two distinct ‘schools’ of rebetika. The
first was the Smyrna school – songs
with distinctly oriental melodies, which were often sung by women, such as Rosa
Askenazi (d. 1981) and Rita Abatzi (d. 1969). They were accompanied by a small
Turkish-style band, playing violin, santouri and ud (lute). The songs were often mournful laments, known as amané, from the characteristic ritual
refrain of aman–aman (roughly,
‘mercy, mercy’) which came between the verses, often as a way of giving the singer
time to improvise the next verse. This style is still to be found in the rai music of Algeria. The level of
pathos reached in some of this Smyrniot song is truly heart-rending.
In the period 1900–30 these women
singers performed in Smyrna itself, in the port town of Volos, and in the
ex-Ottoman and strongly Jewish city of Thessaloniki, a cultural crossroads and
a major trading port serving the Balkan hinterland. It would be performed in
the cafe-aman, with the singer and band occupying a small platform, where the
rebetes would come up and dance.
The Piraeus school, on the other hand, based in the sprawling urban
port area serving Athens, was very different. Here the instruments were the
bouzouki and the baglamas. This was more a dance music – based on the khasapiko
and the zeibekiko, rather than the oriental tsifteteli. And the voices were
rougher, deeper and more generally male.
The distinctive change here was the
introduction of the Western tonal system into the music. Now the Western major
and minor scales entered rebetika alongside the oriental dhromi.15 The key figure in this change was the great
bouzoukist Markos Vamvakaris, born in Siros (an island port, and the most
Westernized of Greek communities at that time).
Vamvakaris, the composer of the
well-known rebetiko song Frangosyriani,
set up his famous Piraeus Quartet in the 1930s, which influenced a whole
subsequent generation of rebetika performers and composers. His main
counterpart in this period was Yannis Papayioannou, the composer of Leave me, leave me... [Ase me, ase me... ].
In chronological terms, the second generation (who came from various
parts of the extended Greek community and were all born between 1920 and 1925)
included Vamvakaris himself, Dimitris Gongos, Apostolos Kaldaras, Kostas
Kaplanis, Giorgos Mitsotakis, Yannis Papayioannou, Stavros Tzouanakos, Vassilis
Tsitsanis, Apostolos Hajichristos, Manolis Chiotis, Stelios Chrysinis and
Giorgos Zambetas. Some of these had a solid musical training and had no desire
to be identified with the older low-life traditions of rebetika – the prisons,
the drugs, etc.
In the 1940s there was something of
a rebetika revival, under the auspices of Manolis Chiotis and Vassilis
Tsitsanis. Chiotis added a couple of strings to the bouzouki, thereby extending
its potential for musical virtuosity. Tsitsanis moved the lyrics away from the
traditional motifs of drugs and prison and introduced sentimental and social
themes. His ambit saw the involvement of women singers in the Piraeus school –
notably the great voices of Sotiria Bellou and Marika Ninou.
The Second World War, the German
occupation and Greece’s subsequent Civil War (1946–49) were important in the
popularity of rebetika, since the songs were seen as embodying something of the
national Greek identity through the times of hardship, repression and
censorship. It is no accident that classical composers such as Theodorakis used
this music as a fundamental part of their creative output. As Theodorakis
himself explains:
During the years of internal exile,
first at Icaria and then in Makronissos, during the evening hours we sang
rebetika, and the Piraeus people taught us how to dance the khasapiko and
zeibekiko in the tents of the
concentration camp. It was in a tent on Makronissos that my first symphony had
its debut performance, with an orchestra of violins and mandolins – in the
‘generals’ tent’, where the generals of ELAS (the Resistance Army of National
Liberation) were housed. I remember someone protesting because General Serafis,
instead of singing our revolutionary songs, was crazy about rebetika! On Icaria
I asked my comrades to sing me rebetika songs and I wrote down the notes. I
wrote, I sang and I danced. That way I collected about eighty songs. And then,
when the ‘Colonels’ sent me into internal exile in Oropos in 1967, I attempted
to harmonize rebetiko song and interpret it in a tonal mode. [... ]
In those very difficult years of
1947–49, the terrible years of the Civil War, so full of hatred and death, I
believe that the urban songs – discovered by the people, sung at the front by
both government soldiers and communist partisans, and sung in the prisons and
the internal exile camps – had a fundamental importance for people’s stability
of mind. It was the element that united us.16
Recordings
No account of rebetika would be
complete without a note on the recordings that are available. Here excellent
work has been done on the Internet, and I would refer the reader to my
Institute of Rebetology website for further references. Here, though, is a
brief but useful summary, again by Lysandros Pitharas:
The richness of rebetiko history
prevents any comprehensive list here. Artists to look out for in each of the
various periods are as follows:
* For the oriental-style rebetika of
the ’30s listen to Rosa Askenazi and Rita Abatzi, the twin stars of the period.
Their exquisite voices are especially known for their rendering of the Middle
Eastern lament, the amané.
* For the music of the Piraeus
school, look for the innumerable Vamvakaris collections now available. These
driving, rasping blues songs are considered the finest of the period and are a
good introduction to the now plentiful compilations that include the music of the
most famous Piraeus-school musicians.
* For the ’40s and ’50s, look out
for the music of Sotiria Bellou and of Marika Ninou, around whose life a famous
film, called Rebetiko, was based. In
Bellou and Ninou, the name Vassilis Tsitsanis often appears. He is considered
one of the greatest composers and singers in the Twilight era, along with
Papayioannou, a gangly, grinning composer famous for his lyrical melodies of
great charm.
* For the revival period, buy the
Giorgos Dalaras records of rebetika. Listen also to Eleftheria Arvanitaki, the
best female singer among the rebetika revivalists.17
Elias
Petropoulos
Elias Petropoulos was born in Athens
in 1928. For many years he lived in Thessaloniki, a city he knows intimately
(not least as regards the history of its Jewish community). During the Second
World War and the ensuing Civil War he was a member of illegal left-wing
organizations. From 1965 to 1975 he lived in Athens, where he earned his living
as a journalist and writer. He then moved to Paris, where among other things he
pursued Turkish studies at the École Pratique. He still lives in that city.
During a lifetime of work he has published upwards of 80 books and 1,000
articles and essays. Many of the books were self-publishing ventures, sometimes
in small-run art editions designed by himself. Twenty-seven of them have now
been published in Greek in the Collected
Works by Nefeli publishers, Athens (these are listed in my Bibliography).
Petropoulos is a terrific man of
Greek letters. There is a boldness of conception in the way that he combines
sociological research with biting satire, guaranteed to get up the noses of
Greece’s academic establishment. His avowedly anarchist temperament has led to
repeated brushes with the Greek state prosecutor. In 1968, at the age of 40 and
in the second year of the Fascist junta, he published his Rebetika Songs [Rebetika
Traghoudhia], a very personal combination of anthology, sociological
dissertation and photography, on a subject which at that time was taboo – the
sub-culture of rebetiko music. This led to his first prison sentence.
The second prison term came three
years later, with the publication of his Kaliarda
(1971), a unique dictionary of Greek homosexual slang. The next moment of
notoriety came with his publication of The
Manual of the Good Thief (1979), a shocking description of conditions in
Greek prisons, which Petropoulos had experienced at first hand. Apart from its
factual content, the book has a biting edge of satire that appalled some and
delighted many, and it remains a favourite among free-thinkers to this day.18
It was immediately banned (by this time Greece had emerged from Fascism, but
the old laws still applied) and both Petropoulos, by then resident in Paris,
and his publisher were sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Today it can be
freely bought in any bookstore.
The range and diversity of
Petropoulos’ writings over the years can be judged from the Bibliography: Turkish Coffee in Greece (1979); The Brothel (1980), a study of
historical and present-day brothels in Greece; Graves of Greece (1982), a remarkable illustrated essay on Greek
graveyards; Holy Hashish (1987), a
detailed sociology and practical handbook of hashish; Corpses, Corpses, Corpses... (1988), the author’s macabre memories
of the occupation of Greece and the ensuing Civil War; and The Moustache (1989), a study of the moustache in the culture of
Balkan manhood.
The year 1999 has seen the
publication of his illustrated History of
the Condom, and a republication of his Cemeteries
of Greece is in the pipeline. And rest assured, there is more to come. At
the age of 72, Petropoulos is not stopping yet!
Aqua Dolce,
Levanto
8.7.1999
Notes
1. Lysandros Pitharas, Music of the Outsiders, leaflet, 1988.
This accompanied the documentary made for British television (Channel Four).
2. Ole L. Smith, ‘New Evidence on
Greek Music in the USA: [Richard] Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Record’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, vol.
18, no. 2, 1992, pp. 97–109. For a scathing and penetrating critique of the
state of rebetology studies, see Ole Smith’s other major article, ‘Research on
Rebetika: Some Methodological Problems and Issues’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, no. 6, 1989 (part reprinted in
Appendix A below).
3. In November–December 1993 the
Athens-based music magazine Defi
published a special issue (no. 18) on the Greek diaspora in Asia Minor. It
contains important research articles on the musical culture of that community.
I have translated some of these articles and placed them on my Institute of
Rebetology website (for details, see Appendix B below).
4. See Petropoulos’ preface (pp.
13–14) to: Katharine Butterworth and Sara Schneider (eds), Rembetika, Songs from the Old
Greek Underworld, with essays by Markos Dragoumis, Ted Petrides and Elias
Petropoulos, Komboloi, Athens, 1975.
5. Pitharas, Music of the Outsiders, op. cit.
6. By way of a side note, the
complex interplay of Greek song and dance with the indigenous traditions of
Asia Minor is exemplified in an extraordinary account from Xenophon’s Anabasis, which I have included as
Appendix C.
7. As the price for Greek
participation on the side of the Entente in the First World War, the Allied
Supreme Council in Paris authorized the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna. The
occupation of Smyrna developed into a catastrophic war with Turkey, now under
the new regime of Kemal Atatürk. The Greeks, ill-advised or imperfectly
restrained by West European politicians, launched a general offensive in Anatolia
in January 1921, which was defeated, and then, in July, obstinately renewed. By
September they were in full retreat. In August 1922 the Turks launched a final
offensive that drove the Greeks out of Anatolia in September. For Greeks this
was the ‘Catastrophe’.
8. Vassilis Vassilikos, ‘Interview
with Mikis Theodorakis’, Euros, no.
5–6, Sept.–Dec. 1993; similar ground is covered in the George Giannaris
biography, Mikis Theodorakis: Music and
Social Change, Allen & Unwin, London, 1973.
9. Costas Ferris, CD-Rom Encyclopaedia of Rebetika, in
preparation.
10. Suzanne Aulin and Peter
Vejleskov, Chasikilidhika Traghoudhia, Museum
Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 1991; Grèce: La tradition du Rébétiko. Chansons
des fumeries et des prisons, performed by the Rebetiko Tsardi group, Ocora
558648 (1985/9).
11. Giorgos Dalaras has produced a
wonderful record of rebetika songs of the Occupation period, with sleeve notes
containing illustrated source materials. Giorgos Dalaras, ÑåìðÝôéêá ôçò Êáôï¸Þò
[Rebetika of the Occupation], Minos DAL–MSM 391 (1980).
12. Cited in the special issue of Defi magazine, vol. 18, Nov.–Dec. 1993,
devoted to an overview of the music of Asia Minor.
13. The dais (pl. daides) was the
‘tough guy’, usually armed and a sort of hero of the underworld. There were
three ‘classes’, or categories: 1.
The ‘real, wise dais’: usually a quiet, not-so-young man who had done time in
prison (the crime would have been a serious offence, but one respected by all
the outlaws as a ‘crime of honour’). This man had now been accepted back into
society and would have some independent job such as working as a bodyguard,
keeping a coffee-shop, managing workers in the port, etc. He was very fair in
his dealings with his clients, whether friends or strangers, and would not harm
anybody – unless he was morally offended or insulted, in which case he could
kill. He was also very loyal and ready to protect the people he loved and
admired (i.e. singers or musicians). He had a very strong sense of justice. 2. The ‘second-class dais’: usually a
common criminal who was constantly in and out of prison. He liked to act as a
‘tough guy’, trying to provoke someone into giving him a reason to kill. 3. The ‘pseudo-dais’, or koutsavakis: a young outsider who
imitated the real daides by walking lamely (koutsos
means lame), dressing like a mangas and wearing only one sleeve of his jacket.
He was incapable of handling a real fight and played the ‘tough guy’ only in
his dealings with the weak and the very young. [I am indebted to Costas Ferris
for this information.]
14. S. Broughton et al. (eds), The Rough Guide to World Music (London,
1994), which has an excellent section on Greek music.
15. For further information on dhromi, see my Institute of Rebetology
website.
16. Vassilikos, ‘Interview with
Theodorakis’, op. cit.
17. The biggest stockist of
rebetika, and indeed all Greek music, in the UK is the Trehantiri record shop,
which has a website and does mail-order worldwide. Address: Trehantiri, 365–367
Green Lanes, London N4 1DY. Tel/fax: 020–8802.6530. E-mail:
trehantiri@greekmus.demon.co.uk.
Zeno’s Greek bookshop has a stock of
books on rebetika and orders titles from Greece. It also has a website.
Address: Zeno Booksellers, 6 Denmark Street, London WC2H.8LP. Tel:
020–7240.1968. Fax: 020–7836.2522. E-mail: zenobooksellers@aol.com.
18. The Manual of the Good Thief [Åã¸åéñßäéïí ôïõ Êáëïý ÊëÝöôç],
Digamma, Athens, 1979; reprinted Nefeli, Athens, 1979. Here Petropoulos
endearingly describes Greece (thinly disguised as ‘Antiqua’) in terms
guaranteed to offend: ‘the national drink of its inhabitants is Turkish
coffee... ’; ‘the national food is a Turkish dish, imam-bayildi... ’; ‘and all queers who are not priests are regarded
as criminals’. As he says elsewhere, ‘I have been amnestied for this and that,
but not for my crimes against the Church. I am under sentence from the law that
protects the Church. For blasphemy. I write that all bishops are poustis [queers]. I use terrible insults
against the Church... ’.
* This article is reprinted from Rebetika:
Songs of the Greek Underworld, Saqi Books, 26 Westbourne Grove, London, W2
5RH. Tel: 0207 221 9347. Price £12.95 pb.
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