Brendan Foreman wrote this review which first ran on Green Man Review.
Rembetica, the music of the Greek underground, has often been referred to as the “Greek blues.” With its sensual sounds and often unconventional, if not subversive, subject matters, including class struggle, forbidden love and drug use, rembetika was often a perfect soundtrack to the dispossessed and downtrodden of Greek and Turkish societies in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, filling a musical role similar to that which blues music filled for the American Black community.
With the release of this fine recording, a compilation of tracks recorded from the late Twenties to the very early Forties, another striking similarity comes to the fore: the predominance of fiercely independent women singers who used their songcraft to express themselves in ways that were often inaccessible to other women of their time. Each of the tracks here feature the singing of one of the famous “Rembetisses,” free spirits who defied society’s conventions, such as Marika Papagika, Rita Abadzi, Roza Eskenazi, and Marika Kanaropoulou, some of whom were extremely popular in the eastern Mediterranean region during the pre-WWII era.
Opening with the biting voice of Marika Papagika in “I’ll Smash the Glasses” (“I’ll get drunk and smash the glasses for what you said to me/And then I’ll break some more for those bitter words”), this CD makes clear that these aren’t women that you want to mess with. Another Rembetisse, Maria Politissa, asserts herself boldly in “You Won’t Fool Me”: “I won’t have just one man/I’ll take whoever I fancy/That’s the way I’ll live my life.” Similarly, Angelitsa Papazoglou refuses to deny herself certain pleasures in “The Dervish’s Broad”: “I’m a good-time girl/I also smoke hashish/And that’s why everybody says/ That I love a dervish.”
Class struggle is touched upon in Rita Abadzi’s version of “The Shoe-Maker,” an appreciative meditation of the shoe maker’s craft and life. Abadzi forthrightly speaks out “Long live the shoe-makers” at the end of the song.
There are many songs here that remind the listener that the singers (and the audiences) of these songs often lived hectic, rough-and-tumble lives, full of the anxiety of the disenfranchised. Rita Abadzi ponders her lot in life in “Always I Walk”: “Always I walk lost in thought/And always full of sorrow/For unto this world I was not born/For happiness and joy.” In the slow, haunting “To Whom Can I Tell My Pains,” Marika Kanaropoulou laments wailfully over a droning mandola and a harsh violin: “To whom can I tell my pains/So s/he can give me solace/Since this world has grown false/And life will be snuffed out”).
The music of these songs is a great selection of some early rembetica, when the Turkish elements of the style — including some very Arabian harmonic sensibilities — were still very active in the field. Most songs have a minimal, yet effective backing of a bouzouki or two and sometime a fiddle. While there is little instrumental pyrotechnics here (after all, the important stuff was the singing), the playing — often by unnamed musicians — is more than competent and a stray bouzouki or violin solo does sneak in every so often.
The listener can easily imagine straying into a port bar of 1930s Greece late at night and seeing, through the thick hashish and tobacco smoke, a rembetisse belting out these songs while being backed by a small combo of bouzoukis and violins.
It is fairly surprising that most of these tracks are over sixty years old. They have survived well in sound quality and are very accessible to the Western ear of the late 20th century. (even more than a lot of American recordings of the time!) With its fairly extensive liner notes, which include song translations, recording data, and short biographies of all of the Rembetisses, this CD is an excellent document of a by-gone era of defiant independence and artful expression amidst the rigors of Greek society and tumult of the Greek underworld.
(Rounder, 2000)
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