MISSISSIPPI RECORDS NEWSLETTER VOL. 26
Celebrating the great George “Curly” Katsaros…

❂ All Parts Dark: Secrets of Rebetiko with researcher Tony Klein

❂ Greek Sponge Fishers of Greater Tampa: A look at Katsaros’ adopted home, Tarpon Springs, Florida

❂ ‘Nada Brahma’: New music by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio

❂ Events, sales, and more…

Dear friends,

With our finger on the pulse of the cultural moment, we bring you the latest installment of the Mississippi newsletter, all about a 100+ year old Greek guitarist who died in the 1990s. This is the content the people demand!!!

MRI-204 Giorgos Katsaros (co-release with Olvido Records)

We’re proud to release these early recordings by George Katsaros, a legend of Greek rebetika whose life spanned almost the entirety of the 20th century. Katsaros brought the music of the old country to Greeks stranded in the US, combined with steel string blues and Depression ballads he picked up on the road in the 20s and 30s. He eventually retired in the mythic town of Tarpon Springs, Florida, home to a large population of Greek sponge fishers who migrated almost entirely from a single island in the Aegean.

In this issue, we interview musician and researcher Tony Klein, an expert in Greek music who helped translate and present the Katsaros record. Tony situates Katsaros and his instrument in time, and explains how a 75-year-old Englishman living in Sweden came to know so much about the bouzouki.

Meanwhile, musician and scholar Panayotis League tells us about growing up in Tarpon Springs, where all the kids knew Katsaros as “Two Tone” for his shock of black and white hair. 

“Most people just knew him as this eccentric old man who claimed to have had affairs with Hollywood starlets in the 1920s and who had made some recordings,” Panayotis reports of the artist we’re celebrating today. So it goes - one small town’s aged fabulist becomes an entire nation’s cultural savior, and can be both at once.

To celebrate this release, we’re offering up the last copies of two earlier Greek releases, remarkable records by Kostas Bezos and Markos Vamvakaris, at a one-time sale rate. And all orders on the site over $100 get free shipping with code FREESHIP.  

Finally, scroll below for an excerpt of an interview between The Cosmic Tones Research Trio and the one and only Matt Marble of the American Museum Of Paramusicology (AMP). If your mind-body-music-spirit signal is feeling strained or weak, this is the publication for you.

All the love,

Cyrus &  Mississippi Records

(Giorgos Katsaros in his house in Tarpon Springs, FL.
Photo Credit: Kounadis Archive)

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MRI-204
Giorgos Katsaros - S/T
LISTEN/PRE ORDER

Tony Klein is a British musician, researcher, and writer, based in Sweden. He has played and researched Greek music for 40 years and studied with, among others, the veteran Stelios Keromitis. In 2005, he produced and annotated the compilation Mortika (Recordings from a Greek Underworld), which came out as a double LP on Mississippi and kickstarted our long-standing obsession with this glorious music. 

For a deeper dive into the work, life, and myth of Greek American rebetiko musician Giorgos Katsaros, Mississippi’s own María Barrios spoke with Tony about the weird world of Greek music 78s, the history of bouzouki and how the Giorgos Katsaros record came to be.

Maria Barrios: Hi Tony. You’ve been working on projects with Mississippi for a while. When and how did this collaboration started?

Tony Klein: Before Mississippi, I had done two compilations which I put together. First was Mortika [(Rare Vintage Recordings From A Greek Underworld)]; which was originally a CD that was that was produced here in Uppsala [Sweden]. There was this English guy called Charles Howard who lived in Athens for years and years and was a 78 collector. Charlie was extremely knowledgeable about rebetika and had been involved in producing and compiling a number of CDs. By the time Charlie and I met online, he had actually put together another compilation and paid for the mastering, but no company wanted to release it. As I'd had dreams of doing that kind of stuff, I talked to some friends who had their own independent label. I bought the master from Charlie, wrote the liner notes, and we put it all together, and then we released it in 2005.

That was kind of the start of things. Ian Nagoski [of Canary Records] found it and talked to Mississippi about it and suggested they make a double LP out of it. The people at Dust to Digital also saw “Mortika” and they wrote to me and said, 'Can we do something together?' And that ended up being this thing called “Greek Rhapsody,” which is a book with two CDs. The physical book, which is 156 pages, is beautifully produced, and I'm really proud of it—that came out in 2013.

Gordon [Ashworth, previously of Mississippi] somehow stumbled upon that. There was one track on that that he wrote to ask if he could use, because he wanted to put together what became our first collaboration, which was “The Jail’s A Fine School,” the A. Kostis set.

MB: Was that followed by the Kostas Bezos LP? [A. Kostis was the mysterious rebetika pen-name for the cartoonist and artist Kostas Bezos, a connection that became clear through research by Dimitris, Tony, and collaborators].

TK: Yeah. We knew a guy called Dimitris Kourtis, who's done lots and lots of research on the background and on the biography of Kostas Bezos. He was involved in getting a lot of the information for that record. We got photos, which Dimitris was able to borrow from the family of Bezos. Bezos was actually never married and had no descendants of his own, but there were descendants of a sister of his that Dimitris traced and got in touch with.

We had this friend, Stavros Kourousis, who is a collector and a musician in Athens. He's been collecting records since he was a young teenager, and he's very knowledgeable. He's been involved in virtually all these productions with Mississippi. He's contributed a lot of the audio material, and he's also contributed texts in Greek, which then I've worked on to translate and edit to English, which is how the booklets have materialized often.

MB: Can you tell me more about your background? What lead you to knowing Greek, being able to work on these translations, and be knowledgeable about this music?

TK: Well, I'm 75 years old, I'm born in London. I came to Sweden hitchhiking when I was 20, but when I was a kid, I studied ancient Greek in school, Greek and Latin. I got very friendly with the alphabet very quickly, and so I felt comfortable with reading Greek.

I played music since I was a teenager, but it was really Dylan that got me going in the mid-60s. And then I came here, to Uppsala, in 69’. In 73’, I ran into some Greek friends who had come around to my place with a bunch of LPs of Rebetika, and it just blew my mind. So I figured I wanted to start playing the stuff, a year later one of them arranged and brought me a bouzouki from Athens. I’ve played bouzouki for 50 years now.

I also got very interested in reading about the music, and at that time, there wasn't so much to read about; there wasn't much literature. When I got internet, I thought, “Now I want to start answering all the questions I've had for all these years,” and that's how I ran into Charlie [Howard] through the son of this pioneer of the bouzouki. By the time I met Charlie, he had curated 14 CDs. Mortika was his 15th.

MB: What did you learn by working with Charlie?

TK: What I learned from Charlie was to respect the idea of discography, and knowing stuff like catalog numbers and matrix numbers and dates and when and wherever things were recorded. He wasn't a musician himself like me, but he had great taste for the music. He was very conscientious and dedicated about checking and researching details.

MB: What caught your attention about Greek music from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s?

TK: In the beginning, it was two aspects. I was fascinated by the bouzouki playing itself as a technical musical thing, but then the voices got me. Previously I’d been listening to rock music and some folk music, but I found that the Greek singers of that time, each singer had a completely individual folk vocal color. I found really moving and fascinating that no one sounded the same, and they all sounded very personal. 

MB: What about Giorgos Katsaros’ music?

TK: I first discovered him when I was in Athens in 1976 or 1975. A Greek-American lady called Maria Vouras told me, 'I have a small bunch of 78s that my dad left me, and you can borrow them if you like.' So she lent me eight or ten records, including a few Katsaros and a few Marika Papagika.

Then, somehow, I got help from these Canadian collector guys to transfer them. That was magical because they were the first people I met who really knew how to transfer 78s and get the sound out. They knew that you have to have the best possible equipment with a stylus and turntable and the whole thing, and that was an eye-opener.

Katsaros's records were just three maybe, but they sounded great. Stavros Kourousis managed to get hold of very clean transfers of a huge quantity of Katsaros recordings from the late 20s and 30s, and I think people wanted to make a really good record of his stuff with the best possible sound because it hadn't been done.

MB: Do you think that you can explain, in simple terms, what makes a good transfer of a 78 versus a bad transfer?

TK: When you relay to 78s you want to capture all the musical sound, which means that you don't want to sacrifice the life in the sound for the sake of getting rid of all kinds of crackly noises and stuff. So you have to find a balance. Of course, the cleaner the actual 78 is, the easier it is to do a good job, which will be enjoyable to listen to.

Sometimes, though, you have to just accept that, for example, the only known copy of a particular recording—which is at the same time very important, musically and historically—may be a very worn record. And you just have to put up with the fact that you're not going to get it clean. That if you want to hear the music, you're going to have to put up with some of the noise. On the other hand, have you listened to the Giorgos Katsaros files?

MB: Yes. 

TK: And would you say that you find them surprisingly clean and lively?

MB: Yes.

TK: Part of the reason for that is that they're done from virtually pristine records. I’ll admit Katsaros wasn’t one of my central favorites, but I have to admit that he's a very interesting figure. I think I've begun to appreciate him more now since I've listened to these pristine tracks, and I realized that he was a very accomplished singer in many respects, with a very fine voice, and a source of the musical culture of that time. One of the few unique sources of what was around at that time.

MB: From our Giorgos Katsaros album, can you point out a standout track for you, and why?

TK: Kai Giati Den Mas To Les [And Why Don’t You Tell Us? (1929)]. What I wanted to say about him was that he's a repository of very different kinds of songs. The thing is that he must have heard, before he came to the States, a lot of down-home bouzouki playing, which he then transferred to the guitar. But we don't really know that much about it. We do know that he did frequent the early bouzouki dens before he went to the States and that he started playing guitar as a kid.

MB: You mentioned “bouzouki dens,” which doesn’t strike me as an elegant place [laughs]. Why is the bouzouki considered “underground,” or has some sort of association with it?

TK: It was because, at the time, it was played by people who were low class. There was an association with criminality and drugs. There is a kind of overemphasis on the drug aspect. It's a very small percentage of the songs that are associated with drugs, but it tends to be overemphasized when people talk about it.

I mean, people like Markos Vamvakaris were very open about the fact that they did a lot of smoking in their youth and then later on in his life, he regretted it. But it was quite a central part of their existence just for a number of years. There were also important musicians who played bouzouki and wrote songs and sang who didn't touch the stuff. So it wasn't like everyone was doing it.

Still, rebetika itself was under censorship. The censorship that was established in 1936 by the Metaxas regime in Greece was never actually formally lifted until 1991. Even in the 70s, when they were reissuing rebetika on LPs, they would censor the album sleeves. They would cross out particular tracks because they weren't allowed to include, on the records, songs that had drug-related texts.

These days there's no censorship anymore, maybe there are parental advisories, at most. I think all the Greek songs of that period, whether they contain drug-related lyrics or not, are released without any problems these days.

(A photo of the 1977 compilation “Το Ρεμπέτικο Τραγούδι 1,” which includes crossed-out lyrics. Photo courtesy of Tony Klein)

MB: A lot of folks are not familiar with Rebetika, its recorded history, and how it began. Do you have a recommended listening and reading list?

TK: “Greek Rhapsody: Instrumental Music From Greece 1905-1956,”  a double CD and book I produced and wrote, is instrumental stuff from that period. It’s sold out online, but available digitally. I'm really proud of it—that came out in 2013. It has a brilliant bouzouki solo record, which was made in New York in 1932.

The music of Sotiria Bellou, a very famous singer who was born in the 20s and died in the 90s. She was one of the first openly gay artists in Greece, and she was a brilliant singer and made lots of records. She was my idol in the 70s, and I saw her live in Athens twice in the 70s.

“From Tambouras to Bouzouki, The History and Evolution of the Bouzouki & Its First Recordings (1926-1932),” an excellent book and CD by Stavros Kourousis. Includes the recordings of Manolis Karapiperis, a primitive or pre-commercial bouzouki player. He sang in a very pure folk manner, there was absolutely nothing commercial in his way of singing. There was emotion and music, and for some miraculous reason, about 8 or 9 tracks of his were recorded in 1928 and 1929…

Giorgos Katsaros, which includes translations of the artist’s lyrics by Tony, is available to pre-order via the Mississippi website and our Bandcamp page. Listen to the album’s second single, “The Tavern and the Dice,” here.

(Giorgos Katsaros and his legendary hair. Photo Credit: Kounadis Archive)

Panayotis (Paddy) League specializes in the traditional music of the Greek islands, northeastern Brazil, Ireland, and their respective diasporas. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University. An active musician, he has also published in Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, the Harvard Review of Latin America, and several edited collections.

Panayotis was raised in Tarpon Springs, Florida, a town near Tampa that Giorgos Katsaros called home in his later life, alongside a large Greek Diaspora. Panayotis shared his memories of Katsaros and the place he held in the local community.

(A man hauls large sponges from a loaded lateen sail sponge boat on the Anclote River in 1921. Photo Credit: Burgert Brothers, Tampa Library)


Maria Barrios: Can you tell me about your background?

Panayotis League: I'm of Greek descent. I'm from Tarpon Springs, but I teach at Florida State up in Tallahassee. My family's been in Tarpon Springs since 1907. My family worked in the sponge industry, which has been the major industry of the town for a long time. My grandfather and my mother were both professional musicians and music teachers. My grandfather started all of the music programs in the Tarpon Springs public schools. So I grew up in a family full of musicians—where I would joke that the family business is being a public music educator.

I grew up around different kinds of Greek music, mostly the traditional music from the island of Kalymnos, which is where most of the people in Tarpon Springs are from. Amorgos, where Katsaros is from, is not very far away, and it's a similar tradition.

MB: What brought your family to the US?

PL: My great-grandfather came to work in the sponge industry. The first Greeks had just arrived in Tarpon around 1905 and already were sending word back that anybody who had experience, expertise, or knowledge of the sponge diving industry could probably do well. My great-grandfather was from a very poor village. The economy in Greece was not doing well, especially in rural places. So he decided to just leave. He just moved to America and chose Tarpon Springs because he already had some business relations with a guy who was a ship captain who would always stop at our island on the way to Italy to sell sponges.

My father was in the US Air Force, so we would move around a lot. My mom and I would stay in Tarpon Springs during summers and holidays. So I think I'm from Tarpon Springs because that’s where all my family is. Unfortunately, I never played music with Katsaros… Although my godfather, who founded the Greek dance group in Tarpon Springs, knew him really well. He produced a really big concert with Katsaros towards the end of his life.

MB: Do you have any memories of him?

PL: Katsaros and my grandfather were buddies. I have memories of him coming over to the house when I was little. I have one nice memory of Epiphany, which is our big celebration in Tarpon. I was probably three or four years old, but I do kind of remember it.

There was Archbishop Iakovos, who was the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in New York. He's the one, if you've ever seen the cover of Time Magazine from the Selma march, he's the Greek priest standing next to Martin Luther King. He was a really important guy, and the three of them [Katsaros, Panayoti’s grandfather, and Archbishop Iakovos] were buddies, so he would come over.

(Archbishop Iakovos walking with Martin Luther King. Credit: Dan Budnik)


There's this one Epiphany I was probably three or four years old, but I do kind of remember it. My grandmother had this nice grapefruit tree and the archbishop really liked those grapefruits. So he would always come, and I remember this one year, the three of them were sitting outside, drinking coffee or wine. The archbishop was like, “Well, I need to get my grapefruit before I go and visit somebody else's house.” And Katsaros said, “Oh, you're an old man. Let me climb the ladder and cut it for you.” This would have been 1982 or something. So Katsaros was already 80, or in his late 80s. Nobody knows how old he was. He always used to lie about all kinds of things. But apparently, he climbed up the ladder and cut the grapefruit for the archbishop. That's one Katsaros story that's sweet.

MB: Does anything special about him come to mind?

PL: I was too young but he's a huge part of the music culture in our town. I can tell you some other funny things about him, though. People of younger generations, we called him two-tone. He had kind of like an afro and he always wore a hair net, which was funny. A hairnet and a three-piece suit, very fancy. We called him two-tone because his hair was white, but then he had a stroke, and when he recovered from it, part of the hair came back black again. So it looked as if he had dyed it…

MB: Kind of like “Bride of Frankenstein”?

PL: That’s what I always say, like the Bride of Frankenstein. And he drove this giant Lincoln that seemed like it was his pride and joy. So when he turned 100, the mayor gave him the key to the city, and they took away his driver's license because he could barely drive. So they must have said… we'll trade you this very big, shiny key for that car key right there [laughs]. 

(Giorgos Katsaros with his Lincoln, 1987. Photo Credit: Kounadis Archive)


Then there are other things. There's a lot of controversy about his death. Rumor is that he was quite the ladies' man even in his old age. He had this girlfriend who was much younger than him. She was in her 70s, maybe. I can't remember her name. I don't think she was from Tarpon, but she was this Greek lady. The rumor on the street is that they got in a fight, and she physically assaulted him and he fell and hit his head. I've heard various versions of that story, but he was just a figure around town. A lot of people, growing up, we all knew about him. People told stories about him because he was dapper and very charming.

MB: Was his place in the community that of a respected artist? Given that his recording trajectory wasn’t that long?

PL: The way I understand his trajectory is that he settled in Tarpon Springs to retire. I don't know if he had a whole lot of money stashed away because I don't remember hearing anything about him having a job. I think he just had Social Security. He got a government check, and he kind of hung out at the coffee house. We all knew who he was, but he wasn't somebody the community celebrated, or who was revered in any way. Most people just knew him as this eccentric old man who claimed to have had affairs with Hollywood starlets in the 1920s and who had made some recordings.

Part of that is understanding something fundamental about the culture in Tarpon Springs. It's VERY different from Greeks in New York City, or Greeks in Chicago, Detroit, or Philly. It's a very closed community—in some ways—because it's dominated by people from that island, Kalymnos, and their culture is very different from other Greek ethnic groups. They're pretty exclusionary, and they are not interested in anything that's not their music or the music that all Greek people are going to listen to and dance to, which is commercial bouzouki music.

So the kind of stuff that Katsaros played, rebetika, was not popular in Greek America. It still really isn't. Young people of my generation are kind of getting back into it, but especially in a place like Tarpon Springs, which is very traditional and very bright… Island people don't have a lot of patience for the kind of music that Katsaros and the people he was working with in the early 20th century played.

A lot of people of previous generations, if they grew up in Greece, had been socialized to consider rebetika low life, dirt music. And if they grew up in the US, they were probably “That stuff's not real. I'm not going to listen to music about knife fights in a hashish basement.” It sounded like a weird fantasy, right?

MB: When did that change?

PL: When that music journalist in Greece figured out that he was alive. Because everybody had assumed that Katsaros had been dead for 30 years. Then there was the revival of rebetika following the military dictatorship. So from the early 80s, it became socially acceptable in proper Greek society to listen to it. So, justifiably, a lot of people thought Katsaros was the most amazing composer and singer. If you think about our music and the genres that he was straddling and working in, he's so huge, such a unique figure for so many.

His singing style is very different. His guitar style, especially when he was young, was just very wild. So different from anything anybody else was doing. And then the music he wrote in America, his songs about the Great Depression and the Greek American experience are fundamental to the way that I grew up understanding our musical lineage.

(Katsaros arriving to Greece in 1988. Photo Credit: Kounadis Archive)

MB: Why do you think Katsaros ‘lied’ about his age?

PL: I think he was a storyteller. He was a media guy and he just really liked telling stories. He claimed to have had affairs with all these Hollywood starlets like Greta Garbo. He was in some silent movies as an extra, and he claimed to have given Segovia [virtuoso Spanish guitar player Andrés Segovia] guitar lessons.

One of my favorite songs of his is “Me Tis Tsepes Adianes,” which means “With Empty Pockets.” It's about living in the US during the Depression and standing in soup lines and that kind of thing. At the end of the song, he says “Hoover,” referring to J. Edgar Hoover, as if saying, “What did you do, Hoover? What did you do to us?” So Katsaros used to tell this story that he went and performed at the White House and that he played that song.

He would say that Hoover listened to the song and said, “That's a great song, Mr. Katsaros, but why are you blaming me for the Depression or for things that happened?” And the way he would tell the story is [imitates Katsaros' voice] “I look at him, and I say, you think you are the only Hoover. Why do you think you're so important? You think the song's about you.”

MB: Why is Katsaros music special to you? What do you appreciate about it?

PL: So many things. Like I said before, his music and his soul are just a huge part of where I'm from, this weird little town that I grew up in, and that I love so much. I think that Greek music, getting deep into Greek music, changed my life in a lot of ways. It saved my life in a lot of ways and had a huge influence on the way that I live, and the way that I go through the world, and my values and his music are a big part of that. His voice is a big part of my childhood, it takes me back.

I’m a guitarist, among other things, and he had such a strange way of playing the guitar. Even though this playing was fairly simple in some ways, it was very bold and radical in others, and very idiosyncratic.

We all kind of have these, I guess we call them “parasocial relationships” with people who for whatever reason, their music or their acting or their writing inspires or resonates with us, and we feel like we know them or they know something about us. I have that kind of feeling about Katsaros, but he was actually a part of my family's life and my community. I feel a deep personal connection to him. I love characters… and he was a capital Ch character.

Further listening and reading suggestions from Tony, Panayotis, and Mississippi Records…

Coming out on October 1st, we have “Nada Brahma,” the second single of ALL IS SOUND, a new album by Portland’s finest The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. Some words from the group:

Nada Brahma translates to Divinity in the form of sound. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio's "Nada Brahma" is a call to embrace slowing down and spiritual connection. This piece is designed to help cultivate a relaxing breath and is inspired by traditional Indian classical music. It features cello, voice, flute, and piano.

“Nada Brahma” will be available to listen to on October 1st here and here.

MOR-09
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - All is Sound
LISTEN / PRE-ORDER

(Kennedy, Roman, and Harlan at the screening of “The Secret Life of Plants,” September 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of the group)

LOSE YR MIND X MISSISSIPPI RECORDS PRESENT:
KHUN NARIN WITH ABRONIA

October 18, 2024, 8:30PM (Doors: 9 pm)
Lollipop Shoppe 
(736 SE Grand Ave, Portland, OR 97214)
TICKETS HERE

It all started around 2013 with the caption “MINDBLOWING PSYCHE- DELIA FROM THAILAND”—the Youtube video that accompanied this head-line on the Dangerous Minds Blog was exactly that. Here was a group of Thai musicians being filmed parading through a remote village hundreds of miles away from Bangkok playing some of the heaviest Psych known to mankind out of a crazy homemade sound system. Lose Yr Mind and Mississippi Records present the experience to you live; Khun Narin. They are joined by Abronia. 

Straight from the Phetchabun Province in Thailand! Incredible Thai and Laotian melodies filtered through a psychedelic garage rock lense! A rare treat in this part of the country! Don't sleep!

THE SUN RA ARKESTRA

November 19th, 20th and 21st
Hollywood Theatre
(4122 North East Sandy Boulevard, Portland, Oregon)
TICKETS HERE

The universe's greatest big band. Thee Sun Ra Arkestra. Mississippi Records always has at least 75 of their records in stock and a gold statue of their leader behind our counter for a reason. Transformative music. And.- they'll be doing three distinct conceptual sets, three nights in a row!

11/19: SLUMMING ON PARK AVENUE
11/20: FATE IN A PLEASANT MOOD
11/21: WE TRAVEL THE SPACEWAYS

…we'll leave it to you to figure out what these themes will actually sound like (the band is purposely keeping us in the dark - excited to blow our minds with surprising twists and turns.

All these shows will have beautiful set pieces and projections on the big screen as the band plays.

If you've seen them before, you know this is a show not to miss. if you haven't seen them, don't sleep! Come listen to the cosmic altar destiny music of the future.