Unless, of course, it turns out that Verdi also drew from somewhere else…
In any case, even if some people know where it came from, they consider Misirlou surf rock — and there’s no doubt about that among the average surf guitarist!
This instrumental piece by Tsitsanis is unquestionably laïko, regardless of its origins.
It’s just that the term has many meanings, and I think that’s where we get stuck. If I’ve understood what you’re writing correctly.
Tsitsanis isn’t merely acclaimed… Along with a few others, he is the source. He is the genre itself. They knew what worked and what didn’t.
And he is so important that his instrumentals are considered the jewels of the bouzouki!
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Yes. I wrote about it about a year ago.
Well, either I hadn’t seen it or I didn’t remember it. The best part is that you write there, and in much the same way, essentially the same thing I wrote above.
I’m going to be accused of plagiarism.
Listening to Callas and the orchestra between 1:50 and 3:30, and given the mood I’m in, oh, how I wish she could sing The Locust in the same way she sings Verdi, supplemented in some fashion by the comment of Dr H. P. Koryllos:
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The passage I hear as resembling “Akrida” is from 6:18 to 7:00, where the first section ends in the video posted by koutroufi.
Correction: it is the same passage that is repeated at the end.
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And there too, listening to the period I mention above (approximately), an entire verse of the song fits: “How long will the foreign [well, and the domestic one too, as Dr Koryllos puts it] locust, how long will the deaf barbarian ravage the wretched homeland? Rise up, brothers, forward!” Mentally fitting the words to Kalas’s performance (or Kalas’s performance to the words), I came away with something …else, honestly.
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I’m returning to Tsitsanis’s instrumental piece. A little earlier, Nikos P. and I were discussing the piece’s “folk appeal”, and the extent to which it is established in the public consciousness. Our views can be summed up roughly as follows:
And further down, Anestakos commented:
I don’t believe the way the average listener perceives instrumentals has changed much from Tsitsanis’s time to the present day. Just as today there are vastly more people who know “Cloudy Sunday” than Tsitsanis’s “Oraia”, that must also have been the case when Tsitsanis first released them. And yet he went ahead and released them (“Oraia”, I mean, along with other instrumentals too). Why? So they could fall on deaf ears?
Of course, there are artists who say, “This is what I have inside me, this is what I have to say, so I’ll say it, and whoever’s interested can listen,” but Tsitsanis wasn’t one of them. He cared about how his work was received.
I believe that either he had consciously decided that some pieces would be aimed at a specific, small, specialist audience—the musicians and the few non-musician listeners who would appreciate them—since he already had plenty of other material for the wider audience, or else he was counting on the power such a piece would have when played live at the venue, regardless of whether the listener would be able to commit it to memory and later say, “As far as instrumentals go, I prefer Tsitsanis’s ‘Oraia’ to Papaïoannou’s Solo”, or whatever. Besides, even among his songs, Tsitsanis—as others have too—has many that have not become timeless superhits, but have nevertheless been singled out by a more limited audience because they contain something very special hidden away in them (one particular lyric, a swaggering phrase somewhere, a trick in the fills, etc.).
From these two perspectives, the piece’s position today is exactly what the composer wanted!
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As for “Ta Oraia”, it’s certain that he didn’t want them to disappear into the void. He recorded it three times, after all! One of them as an ending to “What a nuisance the female sex is”.
I’m sure it was Tsitsanis (I mean, I’m sure about Tsitsanis); he wrote and added details for the few who would appreciate them.
This particular solo is pure karantam-papantam folk music. Almost all bouzouki players play it. Vlachos jammed it on television. They play it in tavernas. Dozens of musicians have played it on YouTube.
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The original link doesn’t open.
We can find it here below now.
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I can see it working now, and it seems to lead to the same video post.
There were a few other places in the thread where someone had posted a video clip and it had become invisible. The system does this sometimes. For anyone distinguished enough (like yours truly, the VIP big cheese) to be able to access other members’ post editing, the fix is very easy: you simply open the editor, do nothing, and close it again. The invisible video clip magically becomes visible.
I think I’ve done it everywhere.
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