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Mortika - Rare vintage recordings from a Greek underworld (Arko)
$18.99

The record label says: Compiled by Charles Howard, an Englishman based in Greece, who has previously compiled a number of excellent collections for American Rounder Records and the British Heritage label, it has been carefully remastered from the best available copies of the original 78s by sound engineer Ted Kendall, well-known for his remastering of, among others, Django Reinhardt’s recordings. This is music usually called ’rembétika’, Greek music from an urban sub-culture mainly performed by musicians hailing from Piraeus and/or Asia Minor during the first half of the 20th century.

The songs on this CD were recorded between 1927 and 1946 in Greece, Germany and the USA.

There is also a real surprise in this collection, a contemporary recording of an older musician who, though he died very recently, was a true representative of this tradition rather than a ’revivalist’.

Cliff says: an excllent collection, beautifully packaged and annoted, highly recommended.

A shade over 74 minutes' worth of superbly remastered – and therefore sonically stunning – recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s, recorded in Athens, the US, and, in one case, Weimar Republic Berlin, offer just about the single most cohesive portrait of this extraordinarily tough and beautiful music. Rebetika is often compared to the blues, and while that offers a useful comparison to set novices upon the right path, rebetika has its own sound and feel. It belongs completely to the Greek underworld experience, a history of displacement, social isolation, suffering and truculent reaction to it all that is well-documented in the extraordinary 50-page book that cohabits the elegant digipak with this CD. Of the music, I can tell you that the 21 well-chosen performances present the listener with a superbly balanced variety of the sub-styles within rebetika, and offer not only the heroines and heroes like Rita Abadzi, Rosa Eskanazi, Markos Vamvakaris and Andonis Dalgas, but lesser known, inner-sanctum figures that include the stunning loannis Halikias and the utterly obscure but fabulous Pol-Meraklis, singing his hashish ditty in a doomed 1929 Berlin. But perhaps the most astonishing recording here is the most recent, a hackle-raising performance by Nikos Vrachnas, recorded in 2000. It's a superb live time-warp performance, packed with tough energy and as the final tour de force of well over an hour’s worth of muscular history, it provides a most satisfying end-note. The production values are extraordinary; Charles Howard, the project's director, is probably the world's foremost expert on the genre, and producer Tony Klein has written a wonderfully succinct history of the genre, its meanings, its instruments and its raison d’etre. There's also a well-researched glossary of underworld terms, complete lyric transcriptions in Greek and English, full recording details and two dozen well-chosens photos of artists, instruments and ephemera. If you wanted just one rebetika CD, this is it. Those of you who quietly gather everything Mangas will immediately see the value of this, perhaps the best of all rebetika anthologies. Utterly wonderful. I know its early, but this is already my CD of the year. - Paul Vernon, fRoots

Mortika includes a 50-page book with exclusive photographs of the singers and musicians, complete lyrics of all songs both in the original Greek and in English translations, discographical data, and extensive information on the artists, on the instruments, and on several other aspects of the music.

The artists represented on this CD span from those well-known at the time, such as the ’Patriarch of the Bouzouki’, Markos Vamvakaris, Rita Abádzi, one of the finest Greek singers of all time, and Jack Halikiás, bouzouki recording pioneer, to more obscure musicians such as Frangískos Zouridákis or the mysterious figure known as ’Kostis’.

The lyrics are particularly worth studying for their raw, direct quality. They touch on typical underworld themes such as drugs, theft, murder and prison, but also on such general themes as unrequited love and having a good time.

As well as fantastic singing you will hear many different instruments: bouzouki, baglamas, mandolin, mandola, accordion, violin, guitar, and santouri; and even worry-beads against an ouzo-glass.