Rebetika is the music of the Greek urban underworld, sometimes labeled the “Greek blues.” I perform using two traditional Greek stringed instruments: bouzouki and tzouras (see below for audio samples).

The music can be mournful and haunting, but also lively and celebratory. Lyric topics include relationships, loneliness and longing, social injustice, jail, tavernas and drug use (especially hashish), but also the joy of dancing and of the music itself.

Rebetika developed in the early 1920s from of the intersection of the musics of two population groups: socially marginalized people in urban Greece, including common criminals, untrained and musically unsophisticated; and trained musicians who were performing in cafes in Constantinople (Istanbul) and Smyrna (Ismir). These groups intermixed when the latter became urban refugees after the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1922 (the “Catastrophe”) after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

Rebetika continues to be an important part of modern Greek urban folk music and is included in UNESCO’s “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.”