A friend of mine whom I have not met, Dave Murray, posted a guest entry on another blog, about a particularly stunning bit of bouzouki playing by Spiros Peristeris.

It's here.

The next step is to proofread the scans, and correct any mis-scans. This is very time consuming, and might as well be done in parallel with some more translation.

You know how it is with computers. I had upgraded my older PC to XP,
only to find that there were no XP drivers for the scanner that could
read Greek and save it in Word format. Today I found some new Epson
drivers, and got the scanner working again.

So now I am busily scanning the rest of the book (Χασικλιδικα
Ρεμπετικα) ready for the final effort in translating it all and
bunging it on my web site. Soon I will be pestering about obscure
words again.

Well, apart from the need to sort out a file server with a few
terabytes on it, so we can pipe music and movies to anywhere we want
them, and a few dozen other tasks.

Copy of posting on the Google Rebetika Group.

...was Markos Vamvakaris's birthday. Well obviously, as he died in 1972, he didn't celebrate it, so I did. Some nice red wine, and a bit of bouzouki music. It should have been an arghile full of hashish, but the law is an ass.

Here is our arghile, which has never been used.

I used to have a program to copy CDs that was simple, but somehow I have ended up with Windows Media Player on this PC. With, say, rock music, it all ends up sensibly enough, in directories with the artist's name, but with a mixture of Rebetiko from at least five countries, I end up with sub-directories with Greek, German, English, Turkish and other language names...

I now know "Various Artists" in several languages.

One has it. The Skypename will perhaps be available to members of this group. Snigger.

Now here is some music....

http://www.cdcarts.org/adhocrebetikoband/pages/media.htm

It was the last day of the easyJet sale, so I booked my ticket to go to Hydra in October, for the Rebetiko Conference.

Hands up all those who are also going...

Of course, it IS in Greek, but the music talks directly to the mind...

Sadly the first ten minutes of part 1 are missing.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 - No longer available. Are YouTube worried about the Greek channel's copyright?

There is a new 4 CD set by JSP Records out. These guys are rightly renowned for the audio quality of their releases, and this one is no disappointment. And the price for four CDs is excellent value.

Click the picture to go to Amazon UK and buy it!