Rebetiko – The Greek Blues – The Music of Life

 

What is Rebetiko?

 

Rebetiko, the music of the Greek urban working class, is a subculture which appeared around The Mediterranean, usually in coastal towns, in the early 1900s.

It’s a genre of music generally associated with poverty, the lower class, crime, drink, women of the night and drug addiction.

Rebetes sang about their lifestyle, about what they knew, what they had experienced, of family troubles, a nagging wife, being jobless, about being totally and crazily in love, about drugs, drink, gambling and about death.

In short they sang about life.

 

 

 Performers of rebetiko (The composers, players and singers) were known as “rebetes“, meaning rebellious, misguided or disobedient, a Greek word related to “Manghes” someone with no respect for authority, someone anti-establishment.

 

 

Rebetiko music  was played in “Tekes” (A Turkish word, originally meaning a monastery for Dervishes) hash dens, usually a side room off a coffee house or taverna, here the rebetes went to smoke their nargiles and sing “Chasiklidika”; songs dedicated to the rituals of hashish smoking.

 

 

The Fall of Smyrna

 

 

After the fall of Smyrna, known as “The Catastrophe of Smyrna” (1922), over a million Greek refugees poured into Greece when the forced population exchange was put into action in 1923 (Most of the Muslim population of Greece was sent to Turkey).

The refugees from Asia Minor mostly settled around Athens and Piraeus where they were treated as outcasts and in the same situation as the vagabond “rebetes“, they soon joined forces and “Smyrnaica”, a Turkish style of music, became popular.

Some rebetiko songs were rather mournful, sung with a sad note, songs known as “Amanades”, from the word “Aman”, something similar to the English word “Alas”

As a result of the “Amanades”, music cafes named “Café-Aman”, also known as “café chantant“, literally singing cafes, sprung up in the larger cosmopolitan cities of Thessaloniki, Volos, Aivali and Smyrna.

These Middle Eastern music cafes were a rather more sophisticated version of the earlier rough and ready “Tekes”, the hashish-dens, to be found around the ports.

 

 

Rebetiko Performers

 

A classic example of a rebetiko group is a two-stringed violin, oud (A pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in Middle Eastern music) and santouri, (A stringed instrument played with small, soft hammers) but as yet, no bouzouki, which didn’t appear in rebetiko groups until the late 1920s.

The vocals of rebetiko groups were usually male (but there are exceptions), are rough and hoarse, a short introduction, on the bouzouki, called a “Taximi” gets the “Kefi” (Good mood) going.

Slowly but surely female singers were working their way into this previously male dominated scene; one of the most famous was was Rosa Ezkanazi.

Rosa Ezkanazi’s first mentor was Panayotis Toundas, himself an Asia Minor refugee and one of the most successful record producers Greek-language recording has ever known.

 

 

 

Another famous “Rebetissa”; the female form of “rebetes” (a rebetiko singer), was Marika Ninou, an Armenian-Greek rebetiko singer.

Marika Ninou recorded a total of 174 songs, 119 of these as lead singer.

 

 

Markos Vamvakaris

 

 

A decade or so after the success of the diverse “Smyrnaica” came the revival of the old, Greek style rebetiko, lead by Markos Vamvakaris from the Greek island of Syros, who today is known as the “Patriarch” of rebetiko.

With his bouzouki and baglama, Vamvakaris revamped rebetiko, taking it to heights never imagined.

Mikis Theodorakis, remarked:

“We are all but branches of a tree, Markos is that tree”

The home of Markos Vamvakaris is now a museum, dedicated to the great ‘rebetis’, in Ano Syros, a Greek island of the Cyclades, his birth place.

 

 

The Instruments

Bouzouki

 

 

The Bouzouki, from the Turkish word “Bozuk”, meaning broken, is a part of the long-necked lute family, similar to the pandouris, which is believed to have been in existence in ancient Greece, originally having only three strings, it was the first fretted instrument and is considered the forerunner of the lute.

 

 

The trichordo bouzouki, now played with a pick, was originally strummed with a feather or a carved piece of wood.

In the 1950s the tetrachord, a bouzouki with four pairs of strings, was introduced, as the three-string bouzouki was only good for playing rebetiko.

 

Baglamas

 

 

The baglamas is a smaller version of the bouzouki, making it easier to be carried and easier to hide, during the era when most rebetiko songs were forbidden.

The name of this instrument comes from the Turkish word baglama, which means bond or knot, and has three pairs of strings.

 

The Santouri

 

 

The Santouri is a stringed instrument played with small, soft hammers.

There are many types including Persian and India, however, they differ from each other in style, construction, tuning and technique.

 The Persian and Indian instruments are more widely known as the Santur and Santoor respectively.

 

Let’s Dance!

 

This is Greece and of course dancing to rebetiko was more or less compulsory; and what dancing!

 

 

Be it the “syrtos” an ancient chain dance, still danced today, or the “zeibekikio” from the Zeibek warriors of Anatolia, or the “chasapiko“, the butcher’s dance from Constantinople, Greeks dance with with meraki, with all their heart and soul

 

Rebetes, Manghes

and

Koutsavakides

 

 

 

Owing to the appearance of the characters devoted to rebetiko, upright Greek society saw them as a threat.

The died in the wool, passionate ‘rebetes’, were known as  “Koutsavakides”, with their distinctive walk, “Koutsa Koutsa” in Greek, rather like a crab, sporting swirly mustaches and wearing their jackets with the right sleeve left empty, a fedora on their head, singing songs of disrepute to the click, click of worry beads.

 

 

Respectable, less uptight Greek society, were slightly more tolerant of the “Manghes“.

These were a counterculture, usually working class, from urban areas of Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki.

The nearest English equivalent to the term “manghas” is wide boy, or spiv.

In fact, “Manghes”, with their Devil may care attitude and their street slang, along with the “Mortides” and “Dervisis”, a superior type of “Mangha”,  were actually  looked up to by many Greeks of the ‘Rebetiko era’.

 

 

In 1936, the 4^thAugust Regime, an authoritarian regime under the leadership of General Metaxas came to power and with it censorship.

This led to certain radio stations banning rebetiko songs.

It’s interesting that rebetiko was also rejected by the Greek Left because of its “Reactionary” character and the drug references.

 

The Rise of Rebetiko

 

As rebetiko was on the up and up, poverty in Greece was worsening; with WWII came Nazi occupation and no sooner had that ended, Greece entered into a civil war.

Rebetiko singers poured their hearts out over the terrible and gloomy times of poverty, expressing themselves in their songs.

Leonard Cohen once said:

    “Music is the emotional life of most people”        

He could have been talking about rebetiko.

  Slowly rebetiko began to lose its bad reputation, after all, the whole of Greece Was in this together and it came to be recognized as the national music of Greece; the music of life.

 

 

By 1946 rebetiko was now acceptable and at its zenith with Vassilis Tsitsanis as top performer.

Rebatiko grew so popular that there was an increased demand for larger venues to accommodate the ever growing audience.

 

 

Another top “rebetissa” of the time was Sotiria Bellou, who had quite a story behind her.

Openly lesbian, which at that time in Greece was extremely courageous of her, she had thrown acid in the face of her abusive husband when she was only seventeen before leaving him to become a communist partisan.

During the occupation of Greece by the Nazis, during WWII,  Sotira was captured and tortured by the Nazis and later, again captured, this time by right-wing militants during the Greek Civil War.

 

 

 The Downfall

 

By the 1960s the greediness of the recording industry and the temptation of commercialism were endangering the authenticity of rebetiko which had a reputation for being non – commercial music.

The downfall of rebetiko really occurred though when Manolis Chiotis, considered one of the greatest bouzouki soloists of all time, added a fourth string and plugged the bouzouki into an amplifier ending years of tradition.

 

 

There have been a few tries to breathe new life into rebetiko.

 Manos Hadjidakis had a go when composing the soundtrack for what must be one of the most famous Greek films, starring Melina Mercuri, “Never on a Sunday”.

 Mikis Theodorakis, another brilliant Greek composer, tried his hand with the music score for the best Greek dancer ever, “Zorba the Greek”, taken from by the book  by Nikos Kazantzakis.

 

Elias Petropoulos

Thoughts on Rebetiko

 

 

Elias Petropoulos, a major historian of rebetiko and self proclaimed “Anthropologist”, says of rebetiko;

‘The womb of rebetika was the jail and the hash den. It was there that the early rebetes created their songs. They sang in quiet, hoarse voices, unforced, one after the other, each singer adding a verse which often bore no relation to the previous verse, and a song often went on for hours. There was no refrain, and the melody was simple and easy. One rebetis accompanied the singer with a bouzouki or a baglamas (a smaller version of the bouzouki, very portable, easy to make in prison and easy to hide from the police), and perhaps another, moved by the music, would get up and dance. The early rebetika songs, particularly the love songs, were based on Greek folk songs and the songs of the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople’

 

This then is rebetiko.

Songs of the working class, the downtrodden, sung from the heart, with passion
but then, what else would you expect from Greeks?

 

In 2017 rebetiko was added in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.