Someone once said that rembetika was the Greek form of the blues. They were right.
Rembetika was born in the urban underworld of Athens and Pireus over 85 years ago. It is the music of the urban underworld, of people living outside the law and on the fringes of society. The music evokes a passion of the soul, loneliness and injustice, and a rather egocentric introspection. the lyrics continue to be romantically associated with the underworld of hashish-smoking spivs and petty criminals, of people on the fringes of society and the marginalised. Rembetika continue to excite controversy over their origins and their meanings poised as they are between European and Ottoman cultures.
In 1923, over one million Anatolian Greeks, many of whom spoke only Turkish, became refugees in Greece after the tragic exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The refugees brought along their musical traditions, instruments, vocal and compositional styles. They began organising professional unions and opening musical clubs modeled after the cafes of their lost homeland.
Rembetika was first and foremost men's music, improvised in the safe haven of the tekes - hashish dens where 'rebetes' could meet to forget the outside world. The music thrives on live performance, the atmosphere in which it was born. The very first recordings were made by emigrants in the USA around 1920, years before rembetika was recorded in its homeland. World War Two and the ensuing Greek civil war both left their mark on the rembetika, which has gained in popularity and won respect as a true musical treasure of last century.
The players featured here made their names playing different forms of traditional music – yet this was the music Apsilies all listened to as they grew up.
"We have been visitors of these worlds many times; in the tavernas as either musicians or customers, in academic lecture rooms, and in fiction and documentary films. How could it be otherwise?
But this was not what made us play rembetika together...
We met on a Tuesday afternoon - our teaching in the university was cancelled due to a students’ protest. And somehow spontaneously tried to play together for the first time; the room was soon filled with pre-war rembetika sounds from Smyrna. Their wry humour, the tongue-in-cheek complaints about female coquetry, male braggadocio, the arbitrary powers of police officers, were images of another world creating a conspiratorial feeling of togetherness.
We were not purists rather solemnly imitating the nuances of vocal and instrumental style we had heard on records; neither were we longing to perform these 'old' songs in a free way, in an attempt to bring them back to life, as it were. We were just tuning into a culturally intimate soundscape, prompting an open interplay with enough room for personal improvisation. Our playing resonated with many distant overtones, but all melted into a unifying language of gestures. And our solos were spiced with humorous citations that brought to mind masters of the first rembetika era...
The grin of rembetiko was there to stay on, reminding us that it was not only a form of symbolic interpretation of the underside of social life, 'resisting' conventional middle-class beliefs and social norms. Rather, above all it was a vehicle of self-expression going into trans-personal realms of experience: real music making.
...and we were all surprised by the enchanting impact of our first performance when the audience refused to leave the venue!"
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