353: Amerika, by Dimitris Mystakidis

Dimitris Mystakidis (Greece)
Amerika (2017)
14 tracks, 57 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

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.

296: Romantech, by New York Gypsy All Stars

New York Gypsy All Stars (USA/North Macedonia/Turkey/Greece)
Romantech (2012)
10 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify

Eastern European Romani dance music usually brings to mind powerful brass bands, frenetic fiddles or comically trotting cimbalom. The New York Gypsy All Stars take it in a very different direction.

While they keep Balkan Romani music at the core of their style, they look for connections in many directions. That way they find links in the Turkish and Greek music of their band members, and even further afield with sounds from India and Latin America. The two most prominent instruments of the quintet – Macedonian clarinet and Turkish kanun – are an unusual but ingenious paring, able between them to bend around the whole width of styles that this international exploration takes them through.

What really makes this ensemble special though, is the ‘New York’ right there in their name. They’re not just undertaking dry musical research into the roots and shoots of Romani music throughout Europe and beyond, they are a thoroughly modern and thoroughly cosmopolitan band. That means taking cues from jazz and rock, and a vardo-full of funk. Because as well as the wailing clarinet (played by Ismail Lumanovski from the Liquid Clarinets project) and tinkling kanun, it is the keyboards and bass that give the band their driving edge and add a specific acidity that they bring like no other group.

Where most presentations of Romani music on the world stage root the music in its people’s history, its folk traditions and its quirkiest aspects, the New York Gypsy All Stars prove that not only is this sort of music very much alive, but that it is also very much a part of and in tune with the plugged-in and international lives of the 2010s – and onwards.

129: Peace of Love, by Zarbang Quartet

Zarbang Quartet (Iran/Greece/Afghanistan)
Peace of Love (2011)
8 tracks, 52 minutes
Not only can I not find this album anywhere online to stream or buy, I can barely even find mention of it. As far as I can tell, it was also released with the tracks in a different order as Dance of the Sea, but even then, barely any information anywhere at all. Bizarre. I’ve stuck it on Google Drive for you to download it, though.

Some collaborations just make you think ‘what on Earth made you think to combine these musical elements in this way?’ Usually, projects that beg that question end up falling flat and losing the best bits of every style involved. That’s not the case with the Zarbang Quartet.

Zarbang are actually quite a well-respected Persian percussion group based in Germany, playing with many different line-ups over the years, but in this quartet form, they’re a little different. Zarbang founders, percussionists (and brothers) Behnam and Reza Samani, are the two in the four that represent Iran, and welcome Afghan percussionist Hakim Ludin and Greek player of the Pontic lýra (bowed lute) Matthaios Tsahouridis to their sound.

There’s something really cool about the way the quartet is set up, the massed percussion backing one single melody instrument. The percussion mostly consists of hand drums of various shapes – the tombak goblet drum, the large daf frame drum and the small riqq tambourine, as well as occasional cameos from the cajón box drum and the udu water pot – which are all capable of stunningly complex rhythms and overlapping harmonics, but they never overpower the lýra.

The way Tsahouridis plays the lýra (and sings) traces the influences to and from the Pontic tradition, reflecting the cultural identity of the region of Pontus as a Greek settlement in what is now Turkey. In his hands, the instrument’s position in a long temporal and geographical chain becomes apparent: not only is the lýra’s connection to other Greek instruments clear, it also resembles the Turkish and Persian kemençe/kamancheh and the Arabic rebab, and then onto the kobyz of Central Asia and the sarangi of India, as well as the gusle and the gadulka in the Balkans, in the other direction. It’s amazing how the most subtle playing techniques, a melodic twiddle here or a rhythmic flick of the wrist can imply so much history and geography.

I find it really strange that this album has almost completely disappeared from the internet’s knowledge. It’s a really great listen, and it definitely deserves more notice than the absolute zero that it has at the moment. Why not do the world a favour: give this album a listen, and if you like it, tell someone else about it too!