Rough Guide to Music of Greece [Audio CD] Rough Guide

The Rough Guide to the Music of Greece is a fascinating compilation--far more than the mere aural accompaniment to a thousand sunlit feasts of kebab and kleftiko (a word which originally denoted a stately dance). But those familiar sounds are there, in the voices of Manolis Angelopoulos (Greece's most famous gypsy singer) and Stelios Kazantzidis (who brought back the Oriental influences which had been banned from Greece in the 1930s). The point about Greek music is that it has always reflected the confluence of east and west, and this disc is full of such echoes. We get the rembetika music which grew out of drug dens in Thessaloniki, and the laiko urban blues which the colonels banned in the 1970s; we also get the bewitching sound of Womad-star Eleftheria Arvanitaki, and the long-gone Arabic delicacy of Kostas Nouros, "the nightingale of Smyrna". George Pissalides' commentary is illuminating, but it's a shame we're not given the basic facts behind each song. It would be wonderful to know the words to "the Greek Bob Dylan" Dionisis Savopoulos's number, for example, and the ideas injecting such sweetness into Nouros's café-song. --Michael Church