Saturday 20th October 2007. Ed had said "Saturday starts at ten", so I made myself get up, had breakfast, and prepared all my gear. I found Nick, and we had a large Greek coffee in the Porto Fino café, and I got to the Melina Mercouri Hall at ten o'clock.
I should know better by now. Nothing happened until 10:36. Our first speaker of the day was Peter Verity, talking about the santouri. He went into detail about the construction of the instrument, and mentioned some good CDs of music made with the santouri and related instruments:-
- Rounder CD20 "The Art of the Cimbalom"
- A two CD set "Lesvos Aiolis; Songs and Dances" (half the tracks have santouri)
There's a good discography on the Nonsuch Dulcimer Club website, which happens to have a santouri page written by Peter Verity. He had with him a flat-pack instrument he had made out of xylophone parts, in the layout of a santouri, which he used for demonstrations, as a real santouri is heavy and airlines like to try to smash them.
Then it was back to Ed, who announced details of the evening's session at the Douskos Restaurant, warning that wine was likely to be expensive, and that we should endeavour to be seated by nine.
He then introduced Kostas Ladopoulos, whom he described as a "lunatic linguist". Kostas talked about the lexicography of rebetiko he has been working on for a long time. His talk was very interesting to me, as I have a tiny section of this site devoted to Greek words that appear in songs about hashish (Hasiklidikes). After this talk, I asked him for his email address, so I could ask him a few questions about translations I was doing. "Send hundreds!" was his response. I'm sure I will, although my work on these songs keeps getting delayed by one thing and another. He thought the picture I took of him made him look mad, and has supplied this one to replace the original one.
We went for lunch, and re-convened at supposedly 2:30 but really 2:50 with a session by the singer Eleftheria Kokkilia. She spoke powerfully in Greek, about her singing career, and the importance of the rebetiko song tradition, and was translated (whenever he managed to get a word in) by Jason Melissanos.
The next item was a talk by Norman Healey about the Zourna. This is an instrument like the bombard or shawm, or the Chinese instrument Norman had with him to use as an example. Apparently, zournas are used at camel wrestling events, as well as in Rebetiko. I am unclear as to whether the camels involved in this sport actually attack each other, or have riders who do that. When this session turned into a discussion between Norman and Nikos Politis, somebody who had refused to move forward when it was suggested complained he could hear neither of them.
The session ended, and I wandered off to find my family, who were eating a pizza and some Greek salad by the harbour. The weather was looking nasty, and people had been saying all day that it would get worse.
Dominic and Nick came with me to see the shadow theatre in the Bratsera hotel. I recorded the sound of the show, and took a few photos too, just for the record. The band for this performance was most impressive. You can't see all of them in this picture, though. Sorry!
The show involved all the usual characters, plus an Ed Emery puppet, and a large green monster of some sort that I didn't manage to photograph. Sorry again!
By the time we all got to the Xeri Elia (Dry Olive, also known as Douskos' Restaurant) it was raining quite heavily, and everyone was inside, including the band, who were playing without amplification. This was a rare treat, and I quickly started the Edirol and put it on the table next to them.
| Violin | Kyriakos Gouventas |
| Santouri | Nikos Karatasos |
| Accordeon | Lazaros Koulaksizi |
| Bouzouki | Nikos Mermigas |
| Guitar, vocals | Thodoros Mermigas |
| Vocals | Aspasia Stratigou |
I think somebody had been telling the waiters they have to move faster, because they were disturbingly fast with the food. I have never had a whole meal turn up in under five minutes before, all the mezedes and the main course of pork chops just suddenly arrived, so instead of the usual leisurely meal, punctuated with drinks and eaten over an hour or so, we were stuffed in twenty minutes and still only half way through the first Mythos beer. This was very strange indeed, and if anyone knows what was going on, I'd love to be told.
After a while, it stopped raining quite so hard. The band moved outside to where the microphones had been set up, and as soon as we could, we went out and tried to find suitable seats. At first we were at the front, near the band, and it seemed like a good idea to put my little recorders on the sound engineer's table, to avoid recording our conversation and keep the delicate electronics away from the rain. However, when I politely asked the sound engineer, Nikos Dionysopoulos if I could do that, "No" was all he said. I was disgusted. Fortunately I had some plastic bags with me, and I improvised a tent to protect the gear. Even more fortunately, the recordings have not been ruined by plastic bag and rain noises!
We kept changing seats as the rain fell in varying directions, moving the sound gear as carefully as possible, and recorded lots of very good music. We also recorded several batches of howling feedback. We talked to quite a few people, hopefully out of range of the microphones. The biggest annoyance of this outdoor part of the party was not the rain, it was the very drunk Russian, who appeared to be trying to get the accordionist to play requests, utterly oblivious to the fantastic music that was being played.
Things wound down after two in the morning, and we gathered our stuff, paid and went to bed, after a few nightcaps while setting batteries to charge.