Saturday 16th October
I had a nice leisurely breakfast, wandered down to the harbour and had an excellent Greek coffee, then wandered
along to the Melina Mercouri Hall, only to find I had somehow got the start time wrong, missed any introduction,
and arrived after the start of the session. This was a first, for me. I'm usually there early...
I had arrived in the middle of John Mole's talk about the Greeks who carried on producing Rebetiko after they had emigrated to the United States. So, I only have a partial recording of that. It was interesting to find out more about Rita Abatzi, Giorgos Katsaros and Marika Papagika. I didn't see who it was, but somebody behind me had worked with Katsaros, in the 1960s, in Massachussets.
I was so disorganised that I forgot to take this picture of John until after he had finished. Sorry John!
The next speaker was Banu Açikdeniz, who was talking about her academic paper on the Comparative Presence of Zembekiko. She thoughtfully skipped the section describing the methodology of her research, and read us several excerpts from her thesis on the Zeybeks. My recorder battery was getting low, and I had no spares with me, so this is another incomplete recording. I was not having a good day!
After the end of the session, I [almost] ran back to the hotel to get fresh batteries. Naturally, that meant I missed the start of yet another session. Ali Fuat Aydin was demonstrating with his divan saz how various tunings, düzen in Turkish, or douzenia in Greek, worked. There was quite a lot of detail about the fingering of the tunings, including cunning ways of playing using the thumb to hold the third string. This made the scales a lot easier to play, and is something worth attempting on the trichordo bouzouki, I suspect.
It was lunch time, and rather predictably, I had a very cold Mythos and some kalamari. I even blogged about the beer while I was consuming it.
The first session after lunch was to be a short film called "The Tree that Smiles at Me" about a Turkish man who has been hand crafting instruments for over forty years. It was good while it lasted, but about half way through it refused to play any further. This was a great shame, as not only was the way the instruments were made shown much better than I have seen it anywhere else, I really wanted to hear the one he was shown making when it was finished.
I decided to avoid the next session, as Eleftheria Koxeila from Spetses had decided to speak, and I remembered from 2008 that while what she says is interesting, she says it in Greek faster than I can understand it, and doesn't let the translator get a word in until she has finished. So I went and had another siesta, and very good it was too.
Later on, I went to Douskos' Restaurant before the fun was due to start, to set up my sound gear. I decided to put the Archos on stage, having been unable to get access to a near enough mains socket inside the restaurant. The staff were terrifically helpful, but their sockets were all full. I set the Archos running, and recovered it later, only to find it had not recorded anything. I had my better recorder on the table I was sat at, but that way tends to record a lot of conversation and knives and forks. This year's band was those parts of the SOAS Ad Hoc Rebetiko Band, also known as the Famous SOAS Rebetiko Band, who had not gone home after their visit to Istanbul. They were joined by Ali Fuat Aydin and Cenk Guray, who were not easy to hear, but worth listening to. All in all, I had a very pleasant evening eating, drinking small glasses of retsina, chatting with friends and making [probably not very good] recordings.
