Friday morning was the beginning of the actual conference sessions. The first one was "Rebetiko and Hip-Hop: A comparative analysis on subcultural formation", given by Nicolas Tsimbidis of London. He spoke about the similarities and differences between Rebetiko and Hip-Hop. Since I had absolutely no idea what Hip-Hop might be, this was tricky for me to understand. I made recordings of all these sessions, so interested parties who do know what Hip-Hop is will be able to decide for themselves.
The questions after that session were mostly concerned with whether Hip-Hop actually counted as music at all, which seemed a little negative, in an "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like" kind of way.
The second session was to have been a paper by Alberto Nar, but regrettably, he had died. The paper was called "Jews and Rebetiko", and was read, and at times summarised, by Ed Emery.
After a short break, Gerhard Steingress of the University of Seville gave his paper, which was called "Hondura and Delirio. Lessons from the flamenco-rebetika meeting in Granada, June 2005".
Gerhard was followed by Souzana Raphael, who gave a presentation of the violin in Smyrneika music, which she illustrated by playing examples. At last, some music, and very enjoyable it was too.
This brought us to a fairly late lunchtime, giving me the chance to do some battery charging. One of my Archos recorders was not charging up enough to be able to start up, and I had left the spare batteries at home. I also found I did not have the USB cables I had been planning to use to make backups of my recordings each day. Fortunately, the newer Archos was at this point working well.
The first session after the lunch break was Nikos Politis of Athens, discussing "A case of musical censorship involving Vamvakaris and Tsitsanis".
This was followed by an interesting talk about a new Rebetiko CD by Tony Klein, who was involved in its production. He knows a great deal about how to get the best possible sound from a 78 rpm record, and how it is that most 78s that have been transferred to CD do not sound as good as they could have done. I bought a copy of "Mortika" at the end of the talk, and it was money well spent. I have had to change the way I think about 78s, the sound that is on them turns out to have been excellent, and if well preserved 78s are played on a top quality deck, with the right size stylus, into a system with the right equalisation parameters, the results can be outstanding. "Mortika" has also benefitted from meticulous re-mastering by Ted Kendall, an expert in such matters. I hope it sells as well as it deserves to, because if it does, the chaps involved will make more CDs.
Haris Sarris of the University of Athens presented his paper, "The 'Aegean Sound' of Markos Vamvakaris". This was very interesting, especially to those of us who believe music that is not by Markos is not the best music... Haris referred to Nikos Aivaliotikos, a friend of Markos's father, and the bouzouki player who inspired Markos to learn the bouzouki. Sadly, "Old Nikos" never made any recordings.
We then had a talk by Jason Melissinos of Athens, about Greek Shadow Theatre. Jason is a regular at the Conference, and is always interesting and amusing.
That was followed, I believe, by a performance of the Shadow Theatre, but I went off to do some battery recharging. Later on, I met up with the others, at a big table at To Steki. I was surprised to be recognised by the owners of To Steki, who greeted me with handshakes. Nice guys, and I think they enjoy the music as much as we do. We were joined by some people who were not part of the conference, but thought our music was interesting. Maybe they will come back for the next conference, who knows? Anyway, I had some rather good food and a few beers, while watching the entertainment and recording the music. You can get this music on CD-ROM here.
For even more entertainment I watched the fascinating interaction between the Greek TV crew who wanted to film us, and the lady who wanted to take pictures of the cats that were hanging around hoping to share any food we could spare.
