Authentic recordings of bouzouki instrumentals from the first period of rebetiko
Recordings 1930 - 1950

HE BOUZOUKI

Although the bouzouki has become chiefly associated with rembetika music, it has been part of the wider Greek musical tradition for centuries. It is a member of the family of instruments known generally as the tambouras, of which it is a variation. The Turkish word buzuk means broken, but can also mean "small change". However, the most probable origin of the word is from the douzeni (manner of tuning) of the Turkish saz.
In Greek folk songs, there are many references to the tambouras and the bouzouki, in some areas called vouzouki. What is new these days is the style and manner of playing, not the instrument itself. In his "Autobiography" (by Angeliki Vellou Kyle, 1978) Markos Vamvakaris says:
"The bouzouki, its "taxim", its secrets, are not available to just anyone.... the bouzouki, which was persecuted by the police as if it were a crime, is a marvellous thing and not to be taken lightly. Not just anyone can play it. I learned it from the old masters, little by little, in dives all over the place, because I had a passion for it...I lived just to play it.....in prison, the prisoners made their own bouzoukia. They hollowed them out from mulberry, the best wood."
The bouzouki, tzoura, bouzoukomana, gonato and baglamas can be distinguished from each other by their means of construction, size, shape, number of strings, among other things
The proper length for a normal bouzouki is 0.70cm. It used to be pear-shaped and smaller. These days it is made larger and its shape more closely resembles that of a mandolin. It has a long neck with frets and sounds somewhat similar to a lute, one octave lower than a mandolin. The baglamas, the smallest instrument in this group, is about 30-35cm long with three double-coursed strings.

Construction

The soundbox is made using a wooden frame, to the top of which a triangular attachment called a dakos, made of lime or other soft wood, is attached. This will remain inside the instrument as a support and a groove will be carved into it, into which the base of the neck will be fitted. Onto this frame, strips of wood are attached, starting from the centre and working alternately left and right in a fishbone pattern. Hard woods such as ebony and palisander, maple (kelebek, in Turkish) mahogany and walnut are used for
this part of the instrument.
The neck, made of a single piece of lime-wood, is fitted into the groove on the dakos at the top of the soundbox. It is important that the neck fits perfectly and is firmly glued in order to form a solid whole with
the soundbox so that the instrument will be stable and will not warp. In recent years the neck hasn't always been made of a single piece of lime-wood, but of pieces of lime, pepper or other soft wood, stuck together.
The soundboard, or lid, is made of white wood, usually pine, free of knots or other imperfections. A thin sheet of pine is cut across the grain and these two pieces form the soundboard, attached side by side onto a frame supported from within on seven arches of white wood, giving it a slight convexity, enabling it to withstand the pressure of the strings.
Once the above main sections have been assembled, the finishing touches are made. First the rear side of the neck is curved to allow the musician's hand to slide up and down easily. The neck is then cut to the
desired length. When it consists of a single piece of wood, the curved side is covered with a thin veneer of the same wood used for the soundbox. A thin strip of wood (plaka), usually ebony or other hard wood, covers the whole front part of the neck to form an extension of the soundboard. This is decorated down both sides with fine designs in wood, usually geometrical. Then the pegbox (karavola) is inserted into the top of the neck and three holes are drilled on either side for the six tuning keys. These (called
striftaria, striftalia or kopilia) used to be similar to those on the violin, but now resemble those on the mandolin.
The pegbox and neck form an obtuse angle, which makes tuning the instrument easier. Metallic frets are attacked to the plaka . The smaller baglamas is hollowed out of a single piece of wood, and used to be the most popular instrument in prisons.

Technique and Tuning

The bouzouki is played with a small plectrum. It used to have two and then three double-coursed strings. The lower tuned string was called the bourghana and the higher one kantini. The modern bouzouki has a fourth double-coursed string.
On the three-string bouzouki, the first two are identically tuned and the third is one octave lower. There are many ways of tuning (douzeni) according to the mode (makam) of the particular song or taxim (Youroukino, Karaduzeni, Syriano, Arabien, Rasti, etc.), according to Markos Vamvakaris.
From the original instruments of the tambouras family, the old rembetes kept the bouzouki and baglamas and later added the guitar for accompaniment. The bouzouki, in rembetika and popular music generally, requires great dexterity.
Immovable frets and the use of the temperate scale have resulted in the abandonment of the technique used on the older tambouras, that is the playing of different makam, or modes. Thus the bouzouki has come to be used for the harmony in popular musical ensembles.

The classic period The bouzouki is nothing more than a Turkish saz, a tambour, where the mobile frets are replaced by permanent ones. This means that the bouzouki cannot render the semitones that are so characteristic in the sound of Asia Minor. Therefore, the bouzouki is more closely related to West-influenced music rather than to music from Asia Minor. The first bouzouki and baglamas (an instrument similar to the bouzouki, but much smaller and with a higher pitch) ensemble, the “Piraeus quartet,” first appeared in Sarantopoulos’ tavern in Piraeus in the summer of 1934. The quartet was composed of Markos Vamvakaris, Antonis Delias, Batis and Stratos Payioumtzis. The ensemble heralded the predominance of “Pireotiko” (or Piraeus) rebetiko over the style of rebetiko from Asia Minor. The rebetes (as the singers and musicians of rebetiko are known) gradually began to emerge from the confines of hash dens and prisons to appear in taverns, initially as wandering musicians. The first recordings of songs were by Markos Vamvakaris, in 1934. By 1941, most of the classic composers and singers of popular songs, such as Stratos Payioumtzis, Bayaderas, Yiannis Papaioannou, Apostolos Hadjichristos, Vasilis Tsitsanis, Manolis Chiotis, Stellakis Perpiniadis, Rosa Eskenazy and many others had been recorded. The Metaxa dictatorship of 1938 introduced harsh censorship and the content of rebetiko songs had to change. References to hashish and drug dens were done away with. The history of rebetiko took a turn thanks to Vasilis Tsitsanis, who was summoned to make it more refined and to cleanse it of all things vulgar and base. What Tsitsanis succeeded in doing, by bringing rebetiko out of the fringes of society, where it had been relegated for its anti-social and eastern elements, was to incorporate it into the new social status quo: into the rising new order of post-war Greece, towards a western cultural orientation and the bourgeois dream, a dream to which the working class aspired, a class that found release from its personal and social limitationss by dreaming of the exotic and the unattainable. Other than adding a more European style to his use of the scale, which he combined with the European method of tuning his bouzouki (by getting rid of the traditional Eastern douzenia”or string frets), Tsitsanis also introduced a new style of playing by using quick strokes and slides. This style stood in stark contrast to the skilled, simple and sharp strokes of Vamvakaris’ ensemble.
Tsitsanis also played a significant role in enlarging the orchestra with new sounds (even piano), and also introduced the accordion as an ensemble instrument. In short, he added musical instruments that highlighted and marked the passage into a blended and harmonic musical idiom.
The poetic structure of his songs was also pioneering: for the first time in the history of rebetiko a composer took a conscious step away from the traditional form of couplets and rhyming verse. He standardised and generalised the refrain, while there are numerous instances where he used mixed verse forms that followed his quirky and innovative melodies. With Tsitsanis, rebetiko became an art and the genre’s break from tradition became overtly audible. Modern times Rebetiko was able to break out of its narrow confines after the liberation of Greece from the German occupation. The adventures of the progressive movement had a serious effect on the evolution of the genre because it was no longer possible, due to the persecution of the Left, for it to decisively and directly address the tribulations and desires of the masses. So, in the early years we had rebetiko love songs and only in a few cases did the songs have social innuendo. That was when a handful of exceptional composers emerged: Tsitsanis, Papaioannou, Mitsakis, and the older Markos Vamvakaris, were the par excellence rebetiko quartet. The rebetiko song, as a product of urban culture, never rally grabbed the attention of folk historians. In any case, it was not until just a few decades ago that folk history stopped dealing exclusively with farming cultures and turned its interest to life in the cities. Especially as rebetiko became associated with the underworld and lawlessness, folk historians believed that it did was not a genuine and lucid reflection of the “deeper essence” of the nation and it was therefore ignored and pushed to the fringes of folkloric study. It was only later, after the end of World War II, that rebetiko began to have a greater resonance, that certain writers and intellectuals began to show an interest in it and it was through their writings for journals and newspapers that a debate on rebetiko was launched.
As Tzakis aptly notes: “Supporters discerned in it Byzantine musical motifs and verse phrases that make direct reference to demotic songs and which define it immediately as a sample of popular Greek culture, while its critics saw debased musical and poetic constructions that defined an Eastern past that has fallen from grace and a marginalised and notorious present. In other words, the entire debate was only barely about what rebetiko music is and what the social circumstances from which it arose were, but, rather, focused on what it ‘represented’ or, more precisely, whether it merited and could be included in the body of Greek culture. Thus, critics and fans operated in a similar manner to the earliest Greek folk historians, in the way they became interested in the roots, that is the origins of the elements of a culture that they collected and studied. That was when the origins of rebetiko were traced and efforts were made to find the ‘character’ rebetiko, which had to be compatible or incompatible with the ‘character’ of the Greek people/nation.” (Tzakis, D., “Kleftiko and rebetiko songs: national myths and folkloric quests,” in Grapsas, N., et.al., Arts II: Review of Greek Music and Dance, 3rd edition, Patras Open University, 2003). The modes Rebetiko songs are not based on scales in the Western sense, but on modal types that can be written in scale form and which have characteristic patterns and movements. Some notes are more important than others, while phrases between notes are often emphasised. In classical Arab-Turkish music there are hundreds of similar styles, or makam, and each has a characteristic that discerns it from others. The musicians from Asia Minor used the word makam for their style, but a few years later decided to name them ‘roads.’ No more than 12 roads are used in rebetiko. Other than the usual major and minor scales of European music, the most common roads were: rast, houzam, ousak, kiourdi, hitzaz, hitzazkiar, Pireotiko, sabach, niaventi and a few more. Also, in older rebetiko songs, the bouzouki was tuned in the old-fashioned style, known as douzenis. This too had different styles, such as karadouzeni, Pireotiko, arabien, etc. The dances There are two main rebetiko dances: zeibekikos and hasapikos. Tsifteteli is a dance for women. “Zeibekikos and hasapikos are dances for men who are stooped and shy… Rebetes look at the ground when they dance. They hit the ground with their palms… The rebetiko dance is back and forth, rhythm, a turn around oneself, stepping back, bend, kneel, kneel… Zeibekiko has no steps because it is entirely improvised. This means that anyone can dance his very own, unique, special, personal zeibekikos… As zeibekikos does not have any standard steps, the dancers acquire even greater importance. Zeibekikos lights up the dancer, beautifies him, like a small god… Hasapikos, in contrast to zeibekikos, has steps. The hasaposervikos is about two times faster than hasapikos. Hasapikos dances are performed by two or three dancers holding each other at the shoulder…