The Rough Guide to the Music of Greece

Description

Product Description The amazingly varied repertoire of Greek music is presented here, from the distinctly eastern, blues-like rembetika, to the orchestrated folk sounds of entekhno music through to the tough, gritty sounds of the popular laiko. Greek music is truly a case of east meeting west with Slavs, Albanians and Italians adding their own influences to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. From the traditional to the contemporary some of the best known names in Greek music are represented in this collection including Manos Hatzidhakis, Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Nikos Xidakis, Psarantonis and Glykeria. This release also has an enhanced data track with extended sleevenotes and travel information. .co.uk The Rough Guide to the Music of Greece is a fascinating compilation--far more than the mere aural accompaniment to a thousand sunlit feasts of kebab and kleftiko (a word which originally denoted a stately dance). But those familiar sounds are there, in the voices of Manolis Angelopoulos (Greece's most famous gypsy singer) and Stelios Kazantzidis (who brought back the Oriental influences which had been banned from Greece in the 1930s). The point about Greek music is that it has always reflected the confluence of east and west, and this disc is full of such echoes. We get the rembetika music which grew out of drug dens in Thessaloniki, and the laiko urban blues which the colonels banned in the 1970s; we also get the bewitching sound of Womad-star Eleftheria Arvanitaki, and the long-gone Arabic delicacy of Kostas Nouros, "the nightingale of Smyrna". George Pissalides' commentary is illuminating, but it's a shame we're not given the basic facts behind each song. It would be wonderful to know the words to "the Greek Bob Dylan" Dionisis Savopoulos's number, for example, and the ideas injecting such sweetness into Nouros's café-song. --Michael Church