Marty Lipp -- Marty Lipp can be reached at Martylipp@hotmail.com -- Newsday, July 7, 2002
-- It's not every country where the oldies are a couple of thousand years old. The music of Greece, however, has a music tradition that is as long and peripatetic as the country's cultural history.
Situated between East and West, Greece has picked up influences from various cultures and eras, from Hellenistic to Byzantine to Ottoman to the modern age. It has regional folk styles, bluesy urban rembetika and, like everywhere else, cheesy pop.
On July 20, Central Park SummerStage will present three performers definitely from the modern era whose music is more Zeppelin than Zorba. (For information, call 212-360-CPSS, or visit www.summerstage.org.)
Headlining the show will be Dionysis Savvopoulos, who has been called "the Bob Dylan of Greece." Though Savvopoulos did burst on the scene in 1966 as a singer with an acoustic guitar, an odd voice and a pen full of poetry, the analogy does not hold up well. Both went on to create anthems for their generations, and both even "went electric," but Savvopoulos is much more theatrical and has continuously defied expectations, trying out new musical styles.
Now in his 50s, Savvopoulos is an avuncular presence but can still provoke his multi-generational audience. Once considered a pillar of the Greek left, Savvopoulos was harassed by the ruling military junta in the 1970s, but one later song mocked the left for being ineffectual.
While his most recent album is a two-CD, live retrospective of his career, complete with chorus, orchestra and elaborate staging, Savvopoulos said his New York show will be with a rock band and a few traditional instruments.
Credited with creating the Greek folk-rock movement, Savvopoulos said his aim is to create "cosmopolitan" music.
"Greeks," he said, "want to be modern without losing their soul."
Second in the lineup is 32-year-old Akinoos Ioannidis, a Cyprus-born Greek who fronts a band that generates big rock beats and world-class musicianship. "Greek music takes elements that come from abroad and uses these elements in their songs without being kitsch and without losing its own local character," Ioannidis said
He said his New York set will not differ from those he plays at home. "My music and my songs are my self, and when you meet new people...
you try to represent yourself, to be honest with the people. You say, 'This is who I am.'"
In addition to playing his own electrified tunes, Ioannidis said he will play traditional songs from Cyprus that date back to the 11th century, particularly noteworthy since July 20 is also the anniversary of the Turkish invasion of his native island.
A former actor, Ioannidis hit it big with his first album, which went gold when he was 23 years old. Eventually, he began writing his own songs, which was his ambition since the age of 8. "I wanted [to become a songwriter] so much I never believed this could come true. I feel lucky for becoming my dream, but I also feel very lucky because I didn't lose my dream after it became true."
Kristi Stassinopoulou, 46, was raised on the southern Greek island of Kalamata, where she grew up listening to music from around the world. Her brother would stay up late, fiddling with his radio, bringing in sounds from across the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. In addition, because her parents ran a hotel, she heard the music of American flower children who came to bask in the Greek sun in the late 1960s.
The young Stassinopoulou was thoroughly out of step with her contemporaries, she said, because the rock music she loved was "considered revolutionary," while the rural folk music she loved was "considered too old-fashioned."
She felt that the rock music had a "hidden relationship" to the Greek music she was studying. There was, she said, "the same psychedelic feeling of a religious Byzantine hymn and the monotone viola that John Cale was playing with The Velvet Underground."
Years later, she gained notice in a stage production of "Jesus Christ Superstar," then went on to represent Greece in a Eurovision song competition. Her solo albums, including her latest, "Echotropia" (Tinder), were made in collaboration with her husband, Stathis Kalyviotis, and juxtapose guitar power chords, electronic atmospherics and traditional rhythms from Greece and elsewhere. Like a mirror reflecting the cultures that influence Greek music, her music embodies the cosmopolitan ideal of which Savvopoulos spoke.
Greek traditional music has risen and fallen in popularity over the years, but Stassinopoulou said that today, "the 'alternative' young generation - the people who really love music - they are either in rock groups or in traditional Greek music groups."
Marty Lipp can be reached at Martylipp@hotmail.com -- Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.