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Cafe Aman and Meyhane disappeared. “The Greeks who came over had no money, they were refugees, and the singers and famous musicians came to Greece and were only known by very few people. And we thought their music had no value, because it was reminding us of the enemy,” Loucas says, giving some of the reasons why interest in this music had declined.
Because the composers and singers who sang the Cafe Aman and Meyhane songs were seen as insignificant, they had no one who was interested to learn from them and continue with their music. “So both the musicians and the instruments they were playing lost their value and at the same time we had an invasion of western habits. Until the Second World War that was it, it was the piano, French influence and bouzouki that pre- vailed,” Dimitris explains.
Dimitris and Loucas argue that they were among the first musicians who seriously got involved with Greek urban music from Asia Minor “and with instruments they played with then, without adding guitars and bouzouki, which didn’t exist in this type of music. They were used much later when the rebetiko music emerged,” Loucas says. Dimitris adds that “in the last two decades there’s been a big effort in writing down and saving dimotika (folk music) but no one seriously got involved with Cafe Aman music. We have a lot of recordings from the last century, especially from the decades of the ’20s and ’30s, but either the music was ignored, lost its value, or it was substituted – these songs were played on bouzouki, or there was an intrusion of western habits into the music. Or the songs were played by bouzouki-players who made them unrecognisable, to say the least,” he adds, quite upset.
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On their newest release there are covers and adaptions of both Cafe Aman and Meyhane songs and we hear Loxandra’s ver- sions of a lot of Rosa Eskenazi songs as well. They have also includ- ed numerous amazing musicians making guest appearances on the album like Areti Ketime, Sokratis Sinopoulos, Theodora Athanasiou (Apsilies), Martha Mavroidi, Brenna MacCrimmon, Giasemi and Nikos Saragoudas to mention just a few. It’s quite impressive how the whole album Meyhane – Kafe Aman has such a cohesive and unified sound throughout with this diverse artistry. Perhaps the reason for this is that these taverna songs have greatly varied backgrounds themselves and showcasing the different styles requires variety in the singers and musicians involved too.
afe Aman evolved before 1922 when there were Greeks still living in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) at the same time as western style cafés started emerging. There were no borders, it was just a multinational region Dim- itris tells me. “Cafe Aman was strictly music played in the towns and cities. Especially in towns like Smyrna, Thessaloniki and Constantinople, because they were port towns, they were in effect multinational, all people were gathering there and were passing by and everyone left something from their special tradi- tion. This thing slowly developed into a boiling pot where every- one is cooking together. What evolved were the Cafe Aman and Meyhane of Constantinople.”
It’s easy to link the music to Anatolia when you listen to Mey- hane – Kafe Aman by Loxandra: some would say more bluntly that it sounds Turkish! But what we have to keep in mind is that at some point this music was without passport and illegal in both Greece and Turkey because both countries’ leaders decided the music could not be played. In Greece, the dictator Metaxas banned this music which had no place in modern Greek culture, because he believed Greece belonged to the West. And in Turkey, Kemal Atatürk banned this same music in an effort to erase any leftover remains of anything Greek in Turkey at the time of his attempt to westernise Turkey.
Nevertheless, somehow, these songs survived. Loxandra decid- ed on their first album to leave the songs and their production as close as possible to the tradition “and closer to how the music is still alive today in Turkey. Not in Greece, this music is still alive in Turkey. In other words, not in Greece where it’s stopped,” Loucas says. But their new album is different and Dimitris says “We keep the old sound but we stage it in such a way so that today’s people will understand it and feel the connection. There would be no point in playing the music in the same way as it was played a hun- dred years ago.”
There are plans in the making for Loxandra to tour in Europe
this autumn.
www.loxandramusic.gr
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