The Markos Vamvakaris (the
Patriarch of Rebetiko) Concert took place in London, on the 11 June. This
concert was first presented at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, under
the light of the Parthenon, as part of the Hellenic Festival 2012, marking the
40th anniversary of Vamvakari’s death. Curated by Greece’s foremost
lyricist, Lina Nikolakopoulou, who was struck by the enduring power of Marko’s
work and how young people were discovering it anew, it brings together on stage
a super group of Greek musicians and singers. Stelios, who played at the
concert in London, welcomed the idea warmly, a direct and authentic connection
to the source.
With the songs being often so
geographically rooted, film footage was shot on the island of Syros, in order
to share the sense of place that was so strong in Marko’s experience. Finally,
when asked whether he would consider reading from the autobiography of Vamvakaris,
Alex Kapranos, front man of rock band Franz Ferdinand (and whose father is
Greek), jumped at the occasion as a way of connecting with his roots. Franz
Ferdinand came to fame in Glasgow – like Piraeus a shipping town with a
one-time rough reputation; when Kapranos discovered that his grandfather had
been Vamvakari’s doctor, it was an added bonus.
Whatever title you give him –
‘pioneer’, ‘trailbrazer’, ‘patriarch’ or ‘Commander in Chief of bouzouki’
Markos Vamvakaris is a towering, craggy presence in the history of rebetiko
music. It’s enough to refer to him by his sturdy apostolic first name. ‘Markos’,
he mused, with a touchin mixture of pride and wonder, ‘it’s a big name…a street
is named after me in Syros. The name evokes the heavyweight solidity of a man
who toiled and sweated, the working man, by whom and for whom laiko song was
created.'
Born in Syros in 1905, he started
helping his father feed the family at an early age. They had no money for a
mule, so ‘barefoot and in rags’ they carried heavy loads for basket weaving
from the rivers up to the village of Upper Chore. At the age of fifteen he
dropped a boulder through the roof of somebody’s house, and stowed away in a
boat to Piraeus. By then he’d already worked as a factory hand, a mule driver,
drummer boy, butcher’s boy, grocer’s boy, newspaper hawker and bootblack. One
of his most famous songs has the title: ‘Markos, Jack of All Trades.’ Over the
next five years in Piraeus he was a stevedore, loading coal on and off ships.
He left the backbreaking work to become a skinner and slaughterer in the
Piraeus abattoir. For a man who frequently said ‘flowers, letters and music are
what I like – and add to that fine clothes’, it was bad luck to have spent so
many years in the most strenuous and filthy jobs imaginable.
Ha was born though, with an
aptitude for rhythm and rhyme, and an appetite for beauty. His inner ‘dervish’,
as he called it, his ‘aristocratic streak’ was crying out for a different kind
of life. It carried him off on what his despairing parents called ‘the downward
path.’ This took him to the underworld of the piazza, the bordello, and the
hashish dens (tekedhes). This was the world of manghia – an alternative moral
universe, where exhausted workers sat in shacks or caves, side by side with jailbirds,
thieves and murderers, talking in arcane slang and smoking their argiledhes –
either in stoned, companionable silence or playing and singing on their
stringed instruments.
Even as a boy, Markos had begun
to soak up ‘maghia by the ladleful’ in Ermoupoli, the port of Syros. Now in
Piraeus he lived and breathed this cultural underworld, but his sins were women
and hashish, not killing or stealing. He was ‘the best kind of mangas’, tough
but sensible, a man of gravity and few words; in other words ‘a dervish’. ‘What
I mean by dervish’, he said, ‘is that I was a mangas who could hold his head up
high. I didn’t stir up trouble. People respected me, and I respected them…We
made our money by the sweat of our brows.’
More than anything else, Markos
was a man with a genius for writing songs that Greeks of all ages still know
and love and an overpowering passion for the bouzouki. Markos fell in love with
the instrument when he heard an old convict, Nikos Aivaliotis play. It was a
coup de foudre, and he learned to be a ‘wild beast’ on the instrument in just
six months. What makes Markos a trailblazer is that he took the bouzouki out of
the tekedhes and set up the first laiko band, playing at a small dive in
Piraeus. And so began the golden years of the Piraeus-bouzouki strand of
rebetiko music. The disreputable bouzouki was now all the rage.
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