f32 “P
elin was singing with Muammer. In 2009 we started Café Aman together. The other musi- cians are all Turkish, from Istanbul Technical University’s music department, except Dimitris who comes from Thessaloniki.” I guess there
aren’t so many Turkish bouzouki players. “Exactly. We worked for three years to arrive at this sound. It wasn’t easy. It requires discipline. The whole band was really open to it, everybody loves the project.”
“Rembetiko is the music from a certain period and it’s very multicultural. It reflects the characteristics of this land. The differ- ent rhythms, makams and dances make rembetiko very rich. Actu- ally it’s like a chameleon, it has many faces. There are different schools of rembetiko. It was different in Izmir, different in Athens as well as amongst the diaspora. We’re playing examples from all these different schools.”
“You can’t consider music like a country. There are no bound- aries. Rembetiko was born around Smyrna but it evolved in anoth- er place and died somewhere else. When you ask what rembetiko is to most Greeks, the answer is that it’s the music which was per- formed in the tekes [hash dens] of Piraeus. But I think this descrip- tion is really limited.”
“We’re performing rembetikos from all these different schools
but you can’t put everything into one record so we picked songs from different periods and also the ones people like most at our concerts. We didn’t think so academically, rather we were thinking mostly of our Turkish audience while working on this record.”
“It’s clear that rembetiko is the music of a certain time, and that time is over. But it’s possible to do something good by looking back. I don’t think that its time is completely gone. It makes us remember things we forget. And the strongest aspect of our pro- ject is we’re presenting the music with dance. Something readily forgotten. Take Markos Vamvakaris, the ‘patriarch of rembetiko’, after composing a song he went to the coffeehouse and played it. If people danced, he recorded it. We’re taking this tradition and also putting our music together with dance.”
“In those days people were going to Café Amans to listen to music. Then, they were the first place people made music in. If we were living in Istanbul 120 years ago, we would be going to listen to music at Café Aman, Café Santur and Café Chantant, all around Galata. People were going there, sitting and listening to music, maybe drinking, and eating some mezes. People were asking for songs and dancing. And it was very multicultural – Greeks, Armeni- ans, Arabs, Circassians and Turks. It was more open, more mixed and more free than now. Now we’re living in a more superficial world. In the past, when you wanted something, you needed to go to a specific place to get it. Everything was much more valuable. Music was more valuable.”
“In our religion, we don’t have restrictions about eating, drinking and music. Probably because of that, Greeks were more involved with music places. Entertainment was more developed in our culture. So generally Greeks were leading the way, Armenians and Jews were joining them – also Turks, but mostly Greeks.”
“I grew up on Imbros and I could see the fairs and entertain- ments there. With just a violin, a santur, it was incredible, you can’t imagine. It was a culture of entertainment that really belongs to the past. I experienced it without realising how great it was. I was also into church music so I lived in the old traditions, and in my university years, through working with Domna Samiou, I had the chance to explore folk music. These are the influences with which I decided to start my own band.”
“Café Aman isn’t just a rembetiko band, it’s a music atelier. Rembetiko is the first stop. We had many different musics in this land and we can blend these together. We’ve started composing our own songs, and we can mix the musics of other cultures. Also now we’re working on an Armenian, Rum [Ottoman Greeks] and Jewish common music project. So, Fasl-i Rembetiko is just the first stop but it’s a very important stop. We will stay here for a while.”
“Unfortunately, the rembetiko tradition in Turkey disap- peared. With the population exchanges of 1923, a big part of this music left. Greek music culture continued its life in the church. I wonder how would it be if rembetiko had continued here, but this is something we can never know. In the ’50s, some musicians per- formed rembetiko here but it wasn’t the same. And now, we and some other groups like Tatavla Keyfi are making this music.”
“This name Fasl-i Rembetiko means the fasils of rembetiko but really there was nothing like this. There are things in common between rembetiko and fasil – like the way of sitting. They’re both performed sitting in a half moon. The repertoires are different but there are some common rhythms. We want to show both the dif-
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