Join Pavlos Carvalho and Greek folk group Plastikes Karekles for a night of traditional Greek Rebetiko music at this year’s Festival of Chichester.
Guitar, bouzouki, baglama and evocative singing treat you to soulful melodies, foot-tapping grooves taking you to the heart of Greece on a night featuring music by Vamvakaris, Tsitsanis, Mitsakis, Skarvelis and more.
Rebetiki Serenata: Voices Of Greece is in St Paul’s Church, Churchside, Chichester, PO19 6FT on Sunday, July 6 at 7pm. Tickets £15, under 18s/students £8, children under five free.
Pavlos said: “We’re coming with a quartet version of our Greek group Plastikes Karekles, which is sort of mouldable, sometimes with three players, sometimes with six, seven, eight. In this situation we’re coming with four. And we’re playing a programme of music, which is called Rebetiko music. Rebetiko music is sometimes likened to the blues, not because it sounds like the blues. It doesn’t really sound like that, but it comes from similar origins from people regarded as outcasts of society. It was seen as music that was played by the lower classes. And as the centuries passed, of course, musicians and the wider music world realised its value and its influence on contemporary music in the same way that blues influenced jazz, the same way Rebetiko music has influenced Greek music ever since the 1920s.
“It’s really interesting music because the reason it’s so universally loved and has lasted so long is because it always talks about issues that are relevant to us today, about, well, issues of war, issues about loss, issues of birth, issues of betrayal, love, hate, food, relationships between you and your mother-in-law, everything. And some of it can be very sorrowful music, but underlying it is a great joy, a way of expressing or having, getting this sorrow out through, through music. But also there’s a lot of humorous music because it deals with every aspect of relationship you can possibly think of!
“So you have this sort of melting pot of different cultures that emerge through Greek music, north, west, south and east. It’s very interesting. In our programme, you will hear some music that is influenced more from the Turkish side of music, which is much more modal because Greece, of course, for 400 years was occupied by the Ottomans, apart from the west side. And so you’ll hear some music of this, which was occupied by the Venetians, which is much more mandolin style music and much more like Italian Serenata music. So you have this rich, rich combination of influences. Also, we have influences from American swing, where musicians went to the US and came back and brought these jazz influences from Latin America. And so you have all these lovely influences, and yet it remains uniquely Greek in spirit, in lyrics.”
