http://www.plushmusic.tv/movies/29R/rembetika.html
if you buy the whole performance in HD video (+ seperate audio files also included) for £ 5.99, then 50% goes direct to the performing artists, so 'Plush Music' seem worth supporting
They also have a Haig Yazdjian concert (also from the Greek 'Music Village' festival), and plenty of music in an expansive range of genres
Apsilies:
"We have been visitors of these worlds many times; in the tavernas as either musicians or customers, in academic lecture rooms, and in fiction and documentary films. How could it be otherwise?
But this was not what made us play rembetika together...
We met on a Tuesday afternoon - our teaching in the university was cancelled due to a students’ protest. And somehow spontaneously tried to play together for the first time; the room was soon filled with pre-war rembetika sounds from Smyrna. Their wry humour, the tongue-in-cheek complaints about female coquetry, male braggadocio, the arbitrary powers of police officers, were images of another world creating a conspiratorial feeling of togetherness.
We were not purists rather solemnly imitating the nuances of vocal and instrumental style we had heard on records; neither were we longing to perform these 'old' songs in a free way, in an attempt to bring them back to life, as it were. We were just tuning into a culturally intimate soundscape, prompting an open interplay with enough room for personal improvisation. Our playing resonated with many distant overtones, but all melted into a unifying language of gestures. And our solos were spiced with humorous citations that brought to mind masters of the first rembetika era...
The grin of rembetiko was there to stay on, reminding us that it was not only a form of symbolic interpretation of the underside of social life, 'resisting' conventional middle-class beliefs and social norms. Rather, above all it was a vehicle of self-expression going into trans-personal realms of experience: real music making.
...and we were all surprised by the enchanting impact of our first performance when the audience refused to leave the venue!"
