61 f Rembetika Roots
Young Greek rembetika band Apsilies revive this great music in fabulous fashion, and are about to make their UK debut. Elisavet Sotiriadou gets on their trail…
booklet showing this – a person wearing jeans turning the pockets inside out to show the penniless status. These seem- ingly unimportant sketches mixed with the lyrics in the album notes show that rembetika, despite being an old music style, is still important in Greece today and people love listening to it. The sleeve drawings depict the music being present and relevant in a modern society, not just a memoir of the past.
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Meeting one of the founders of Apsilies was something quite extraordi- nary, with a little dose of serendipity. I had tried to contact the band online for a long while without any response to my mes- sages. Then I started asking other Greek musicians if they knew any of Apsilies’ band members, without success. Finally, clarinet master Manos Achalinotopoulos (fR349) handed me Dimitris Mystakidis’ phone number. As it turned out, this was- n’t the Dimitris Mystakidis of Apsilies, it was just a name coincidence, but this man happened to know the person I was look- ing for and also had his number. I could hardly believe my luck and so finally man- aged to speak with the Dimitris and arrange to meet for an interview later that day, shortly before he embarked on a boat to the island of Paros for a concert with singer/ songwriter Thanasis Papakonstanti- nou, with whom he frequently plays, and before my return to London.
The other coincidence was that his home turned out to be in the very next vil- lage to the one I was staying in, just out- side Thessaloniki! And so we met on a very windy evening in the empty village square, before moving on to his house.
His lounge has two prominent fea- tures; the warm and welcoming fire place and a wall with several instruments hang- ing as if they were paintings. Some of them are old pieces and truly works of art made by luthiers from the late ’40s, he tells me, as we get ready for the interview. One of the guitars was made by the famous Grigors Apartian, whose instruments are much sought after among laika and rem- betika musicians today, and another was made by Panagis, another famous guitar maker who came from Asia Minor and established himself again in Piraeus with a workshop. ”It’s a practical thing, you pick one instrument up and leave the other,” Dimitris explains to me why it’s so conve-
psilies means ‘being broke’ in rembetika slang language, and more literally, being with- out change. There’s even an illustration in their record
nient to have them hanging and displayed in this way. But they are so well made, that they seriously look like exquisite pieces of art, too beautiful to play.
Mystakidis is a multi-tasking musician with solo projects as well as playing with Papakonstantinou, who allows him a great deal of creativity and improvisation. But Apsilies is where he is able to indulge his great passion in music, rembetika songs.
One of the first songs they sang was by rembetika composer Grigoris Asikis, called Apsilies, so they chose this as their name for the group. “The songs we play, none of the composers are alive,” Dimitris
says. They only play old songs in this for- mation but “what we do differently is in the arrangements and by playing other instruments than the ones that would have been used in the old days.” Using a more contemporary sound and improvisa- tion without changing the compositions is what they focus on when taking on the rembetika classics.
The three founding members of Apsilies got together by luck, though they already knew each other. Dimitris, Aposto- lis Tsardakos and Eugenis Voulgaris were teaching music at the college, TEI Ipirou, and they were flatmates for the few days each week they were there. But due to a
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