For only £10 sent to my PayPal account, you can have the conference lectures and (this is the good bit) over seven hours of Rebetiko to listen to.
Click this bouzouki to go to the web page...
For only £10 sent to my PayPal account, you can have the conference lectures and (this is the good bit) over seven hours of Rebetiko to listen to.
Click this bouzouki to go to the web page...
It's Soura Kai Mastoura.
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A tune at Lulu's on the Thursday night of the Hydra Rebetiko Conference 2008.
]]>I had a beer and some calamari at Tasos' Café, and then wandered along to the conference registration session at the Melina Mercouri hall, which was nominally set for one in the afternoon. Being greeted warmly by so many people I recognise is still a strange feeling to me, as I have spent a lot of my life being rather antisocial, but it was wonderful. Thanks folks!
The hall was filled with interesting paintings, as in previous years, and to my great delight, has obtained some comparatively comfortable chairs at last. Some of the old chairs they used to have would gradually bend in use until one could no longer sit on them.
Ed Emery's introduction to the conference was very interesting, but he did ask that it should not be recorded, so I didn't record it. I did take a few notes though. ...section temporarily edited out.... And then we went on to the actual conference sessions, and I started recording again.
The first session was by Halvard Sivertsen, from Bergen in Norway, and was entitled "Rena Stamou: Last of the Rebetissas". An earlier conference, in 2005, had a session with Rena present, talking about her life. Halvard has made a discography of all of her work, every recording she participated in that can be found, an impressive achievement indeed. He played us three tracks, her first ever with Tsitsanis, one from 1951 with Papaioannou, and one with Stelios Xrisinis. As a bonus, Halvard has also gathered together a collection of all the tracks mentioned in the book "Songs of the Greek Underworld" by Elias Petropulos (translated by a certain Ed Emery).
The second session was contributed by Klearchos A Kyriakidis, of London, and was called "Metaxas, the Greek underworld and the censorship of music during the late 1930s: a politico-legal analysis". Klearchos spoke so entertainingly that I forgot to make anything in the way of notes. Fortunately, he handed out copies of his paper, so I can tell you that it "sheds additional light on the background to the music censorship laws which were introduced by the government of Greece during the late 1930s. More specifically, the paper highlights the clash of personalities between General Ioannis Metaxas, the Prime Minister of Greece from 1936 until 1941 and the manges, the composers, lyricists and other musicians of the form of music known as rebetika." As soon as the paper appears online at Ed's site, I will link to it.
After a short break to rearrange the furniture, it was time for Paul Astin of California to talk about "The Groove in Markos Vamvakaris". Paul illustrated his talk with jazz piano versions of some Markos songs, and supplied a printed version of the paper, which makes very interesting reading. Again, I will link to it when possible. The session was somewhat heated at times, when there was discussion of whether the player in the recordings Paul played was actually Markos Vamvakaris or Spiros Peristeris, as well as whether the CDs Paul had listened to were actually "fading in", showing that the recording was started after a taximia had been played, or whether this had been done when the transfer to CD was done. Given the poor quality of the mastering on many Rebetiko CDs, it is hard to know how valid some of Paul's conclusions are. I certainly can't say one way or the other, and unless there are written descriptions of recording sessions available, perhaps this will remain obscure.
That was the end of the conference sessions for the day. I took the opportunity to rest for a whileand charge up lots of batteries in preparation for the evening's entertainment. Later on, there was a fine meal and music session at To Steki Taverna. I'm happy to say that the food was good, as usual, although I am somewhat vague as to what I actually had.
My recordings of this music session have much less of the cutlery noises and conversation than previous years' recordings. I achieved this by throwing a long microphone cable over a branch of a tree, and suspending the powered microphone over the heads of the players. The music finished reasonably early, to give Argyris the chance to get some sleep, and after making backups of my recordings, and having an ouzo nightcap, I turned in.
I checked in for my easyJet flight at the officially correct time, only to find all the other people who had been checking in in front of me were on the same flight. So I was more or less the last to board, not that it matters much when one is travelling alone, found a seat, and went into a state almost, but not quite, like sleep for three hours.
In Athens, baggage reclaim was quick. I went outside, and caught the waiting X96 bus to Pireas, and arrived at the port a little after 1pm. It turned out that I had missed a Flying Dolphin to Hydra by a few minutes, and the next one was not until 5pm. Why there is a huge gap in the middle of their timetable, unless the boats are taking a siesta somewhere, is a complete mystery. So I sat and chatted with a gentleman who was going to Poros to join a mate on a yacht. Every few minutes we had to say "No thank you" to people selling genuine Rolex watches for tiny sums.
Shortly before 5pm, lots of people I recognised started to appear, which was good. In the so-called "real world", I know very few people, and most of them are a little dull. On Hydra I know rather a lot, and most of them are very interesting. To add to the people I know, I was delighted to meet Dave Murray and his wife Debbie. Dave and I have been (sort of) cooperating on a song translation project for much longer than I should really let it take, so it was good to meet him at last.
There was something wrong with the engines of Dolphin 19, and it kept slowing down to a comparative crawl. The journey usually takes 90 minutes, but this time it took well over two and a quarter hours. Ed Emery was waiting to greet people when I arrived, probably because so many were on such a late boat. I trundled my case a couple of hundred yards to the Ippokampos Hotel, where I was made so welcome that I felt they had been missing me for a year. Not only does the Ippokampos welcome me like a long lost son, but it also has a rather nice fast wireless internet connection, so I was able to email and Skype home with my nice Asus Eee PC to tell folks I had arrived safely.
After a brief rest, I went to Lulu's Taverna, and joined Dave and Debbie outside. Dave's dinner looked good, so I ordered myself some fish like his, and some Mythos beer. Nikos Politis, Tony Klein, and many others arrived, and we confused the wonderful folk at Lulu's by playing outside instead of inside. I recorded as much music as I could, with my Edirol R-09 and powered microphone. After a couple of hours and three beers, I was ready for bed, so off I went. I backed up my recordings to the Asus, and fell into the sleep of the very happy Rebetologist.
I'm not posting any now as the files need editing. That will be a pleasant experience, and then I will be putting things on my web site, www.doctor-dark.co.uk
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Note to burglars - the house will NOT be empty.
Good to see you. Sorry I did not see this sooner, but I was on holiday touring England, and have not looked at the Internet for two weeks. For me this is a record...
Will you be on Hydra for the conference this year?
]]>It's here.
]]>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.
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Here is our arghile, which has never been used.
]]>I now know "Various Artists" in several languages.
]]>Hands up all those who are also going...
]]>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?
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Click the picture to go to Amazon UK and buy it!
]]>Most people who even notice this group will have no interest in it, and that is probably normal.
Pireas style Rebetiko used the baglama, the trichordo bouzouki, and the arghile. It's probably only me on here that likes it, but all are welcome.
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