First up, Thursday night was a concert by Αψιλίες (Apsilies), in the Tropentheater.² Great musicians, although the concert had a slightly uncomfortable feeling. There is something odd about an audience sitting silently listening to carefully-amplified musicians on a stage… playing rembetika. Much nicer in a café with a bit of background noise (although not too much!), a full table, and a steady supply of wine. Anyway.

During the concert guitarist Dimitris Mistakidis (whose album of rembetika songs arranged for guitar we have) let one of his secrets slip, as a result of which I can now play a creditable Εφουμέρναμε ένα βράδυ (We were smoking one night) — turns out it’s very easy in open tuning (that was the secret), and matches my vocal range rather well.³ The song is about smoking hash on a water-pipe, and having to hide everything because a policeman comes in: “Hey policeman wait, let the pipe burn, so the Turk can smoke, he’s such a nice little Dervish.”

Then on Saturday I spent a few hours chopping wood at a friend’s garden-house. Excellent therapy after a rather stressful week at work, but also a great opportunity to repeat some rembetika lyrics ad nauseam, so that they really stick. As a result of which, I can now sing Στην υπόγα (In the basement).⁴ Unfortunately I’m not sure exactly what I’m singing: the slang is so thick (and so dated) that Olga couldn’t decode it all for me.⁵ But it’s a similar sort of story: as the song starts someone is beating a mangas (a “rembetika dude”) in the basement behind the barracks, but it quickly gets derailed by concerns that the water pipe has gone out and has to be relit, and that Mitsos (good name for a mangas) is room-stoned.

Latest addition to my vocabulary on the back of these two songs: ντουμάνι (doumani), meaning smoke, which appears in both of them. Tells you something about rembetika themes.

Then last night we went to the cleverly-named Restaurant I-Grec⁶ for an Easter music session. Played a lot, drank a lot, saw some highly impressive belly-dancing, got home at three in the morning. Which counts as early by Greek standards.

Last but not least, after all this rembetika-related enthusiasm we have decided to attend the Music Village this year. It’s a music festival which takes over a village in Pelion for two weeks, with all manner of courses and workshops to follow and (of course) lots of concerts to see too. We’re going for the week with “Folk and popular Greek music” and I expect I’ll follow the rembetika course (given by two members of Αψιλίες, as it happens). Olga is still vacillating: rembetika, accordion, or theory of improvisation… the “problem” appears to be that there will be too much wonderful stuff to see and learn and do. So that’s exciting. Remains to be seen how we will pay for it, and what rearrangements I’m going to have to make to get the time free (after already bending the rules slightly to get our New Zealand trip in December) but we’ll manage somehow.

Notes:

1. And I note that the last entry was published more than a month ago; folks at home who use this blog to reassure themselves that I’m still alive might be starting to worry a bit.
2. The Tropentheater promotional information on these guys has a strangely loose relationship with the truth; there is some suspicion that they might have confused them with another group entirely in writing the biographical bit. Or someone was just feeling creative that day.
3. Unusual, because my vocal range is hardly a “range” at all, unless you squint at it sideways in a dim light. Thankfully the rembetika atmosphere tends towards the dim and squinty, and purity of tone is not a necessary virtue among rembetika singers, at least the male ones.
4. I say “sing”… well, more or less. See above note about my vocal abilities.
5. Google translate is amusing, but not helpful, in these sorts of situations.
6. Ok, only clever if you’re Dutch, and if you know that it’s a Greek restaurant in IJburg. Satisfied?

Μια κοπέλα με ρώτησε κάτι που δεν κατάλαβα. Είπα, “Δεν είμαι Έλληνας.” Είπε αυτή, “Δεν είσαι Έλληνας και παίζεις μπαγλαμά;” Εγώ: “Δεν είναι μπαγλαμάς! Τζουράς είναι!” Είπε “Συγνώμη”… και έφυγε.

That is: A girl asked me something which I didn’t understand. I said, “I’m not Greek.” She said, “You’re not Greek and you play baglamas?” Me: “It’s not a bagmalas! It’s a tzouras!” She said “Sorry”… and left.

It’s a conversation, of a sort, right?

[Any correct spelling in the Greek portion of this post was made possible by the kind intervention of Olga.]

Could have just been Olga objecting I suppose.

It’s wonderful because, completely unlike English, if you see a word written down you know exactly how to pronounce it. It’s awful because knowing how to pronounce a word still leaves you lots of options for how to spell it.

Today’s discovery is the verb “to use”: χρησιμοποιώ. Third person singular (present) that’s χρησιμοποιεί, which has the distinction of containing almost all the ways to spell /i/ (the vowel of English “street”): η, ι, οι, and ει. It’s only missing υ, and yes folks, that means there are five ways to spell that one sound.

Dutch: I keep my money in a “bank”; You sit on a “bank” to watch tv (couch). Not the same.

Greek: I (could, if I were in Greece) keep my money in a “τράπεζα”. You eat dinner at the “τραπέζι” (table). Not the same.

(Yes, the last one isn’t actually lexical ambiguity. So sue me. Also, Micha tells me that German has the first three: financial institution, ground abutting a river, and bench. Whee!)

There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to go wrong). And if I haven’t had my morning coffee, Ισραήλ just looks too similar. Getting to Japan depends on two additional little problems: I have trouble remembering that it’s spelled with omega instead of omicron, and the font our textbook uses makes sigma, omicron and alpha all look really similar, especially before pi. So I can see Ισπανία and read Ιαπονία which really should be Ιαπωνία.

Also I, like several of my classmates, have a tendency to read ρολόι (roloi, watch or clock) as poli (very), or on a bad day when my accent slips, pouli (πουλί? however it’s spelled, it makes everyone laugh). “Πόσο κάνει τον πουλί σου, Παυλο;”

(Whatever was wrong with Firefox and Greek input seems to have fixed itself. Maybe it was the KDE updates the other day?)

What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was

• spoken by someone I don’t know well,
• in a context where many different sentences could have been expected, and
• understood compositionally, word-by-word, not by pattern matching on things I recognise.

Which means it’s happening! Rock it with the language faculty!