353: Amerika, by Dimitris Mystakidis

Dimitris Mystakidis (Greece)
Amerika (2017)
14 tracks, 57 minutes
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Rembetiko music is often referred to as the blues of urban Greece for its lyrical focus on the stories of lives hard lived as well as that general vibe that it gives off. Stylistically, though, there’s no real connection to blues, or even any particular resemblance there either – it has much more in common with Turkish and Arabic music, to which it can trace many of its melodic scales, and Balkan music that comes through occasionally in the rhythms. Above all, it’s just really obviously Greek music.

But actually, rembetiko does have its links to the blues, if you know where to look. Dimitris Myskatidis is one of the foremost guitarists in rembetiko music, in both traditional and innovative styles, and is also a historian for the style, exploring the various pasts and paths of the style and incorporating that into his music. For Amerika, he looked (unsurprisingly) to the United States and to the fingerpicking guitar style of tsibiti that developed among Greek musicians there in the early 20th century.

The unique way that the guitar is used in the tsibiti style was directly influenced by the way delta blues players created their own tapestries of sound, even down to the way they tuned their strings in ways unheard of in Greece. Add on top of that lyrics that told an immigrant’s tale of oppression, poverty and longing, tsibiti rembetiko is a style that only could have come from the US.

Amerika is a set of 14 such tsibiti songs from that style’s heyday. He plays it all solo, just his expert guitar and deep, silky voice – although with a few guest singers on a couple of the songs – and it’s incredibly evocative. And amazing how clear the blues is in there, too. The melodies and rhythms and unexpected chord changes are all totally Greek, and then you get a blue note thrown in there, or an errant bending or pulling-off of a string and it all falls into place, and you’re struck just by how bluesy the whole thing is. It’s quite uncanny how little and yet how much that influence is there. As if to ram things home at the beginning of the album, Mystakidis makes the connections even more obvious by starting ‘To West’, the second track on the album, playing deep delta blues riffs that seamlessly transform into the Hellenic lament.

Dimitris Mystakidis’ music is a great example of applied musical history. The music of the early Greek immigrants to the US is important to understanding their experiences and an important area of American history, but it is so little known. With Amerika, Mystakidis not only lets the voices of these people be heard once again, but explores the music’s stylistic origins and originality with the most subtle but startling ways. By looking at the tsibiti style, Mystakidis makes sure that this obscure shared branch of Greek folk music and African American blues gets some of the recognition it deserves.