Amanedes & Taximia, by Various Artists

Amanedes & Taximia

by Various Artists

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1.	Taxim Rast 03:13	buy track
2.	Roza Eskanazi - Gazeli Ousak 03:26	buy track
3.	Markos Vamvakaris - Taxim Zeibekiko 03:09	buy track
4.	Antonis 'Dalgas' Diamantidis - Manes Houseini 03:15	buy track
5.	Roza Eskenazi - Gazeli Seknaz 03:21	buy track
6.	Stratos Pagioumtzis - Manes Rast Neva 03:18	buy track
7.	Markos Melkon - Neva Taxim 02:56	buy track
8.	Vangelis Sofroniou - Hijaz Manes 02:57	buy track
9.	Kostas Karipis - Hijazkiar Kurdi Manes 03:37	buy track
10.	A Katsopoulos - Segkiah Taxim 03:08	buy track
11.	Antonis 'Dalgas' Diamantisi - Mestenkiar Manes 03:24	buy track
12.	A Poulos - Ferahnak Manes 04:10	buy track

about

A large portion of this page (mystrasrecords.bandcamp.com) as well as my personal studies of music have revolved around the amanedes & taximia genre.

The appeal was and still is primarily aesthetic, but the politics surrounding the music are involved enough that they should possibly be touched on briefly.

For one, musically-politically, the genre has A LOT of overlap w/ modal and free jazz, which is probably why I was drawn to its aesthetics in the first place. The Greek roads (dromoi) or Arab maqams or Byzantine Echoes or whatever you want to call them are meant to be played essentially the same way Coltrane began to play his ‘sheets of sound’, combining and recombining scales and chords in rapid successions, in a way that’s almost fractal, definitely wavy, which makes the Dick Dale surf sound kind of make sense.

The two genres remain basically unintegrated, in my opinion at least, because in the Eastern Mediterranean these genres were prosperous when THEIR empire (the Ottomans) was still relatively powerful. The minorities of the Ottoman empire (Greeks, Jews, Armenians) played their modal shit and society went on in its own bubble, just like African-American musicians in the jazz scene in the 1960s/70s American Empire and its own bubble (with admittedly more world influence).

But once the Ottoman state collapsed post-WWI then the race was on in both Greece and Turkey to Westernize as much as possible. So while jazz was making its way east in the relatively free American Empire, Greek and Turkish music was making its way west in Second World states that desperately wanted to curry economic European favo. Promoting modal quote-unquote “oriental” music was no longer a priority by mid-20th century.

The other political element I’ll touch on just briefly is that the “folk” music label is bullshit. This music wasn’t “folk” in the East. It was classical. The taqsim is still a classical genre in some parts of the Arab world (I think).

But again this goes to who has the empire and when. When you have an empire (Ottoman or otherwise), then your shit is classical. When that empire collapses you become cute folk musicians, regardless of whether or not you’re playing the most modal stuff or not.

Anyway, this collection of songs is, again in my humble opinion, some of the best selections of the genre (although if you added up all the recordings of amanedes available it’s probably only about 4 or 5 LPs worth). And it’s short and to the point. To me it’s probably the best introduction to the peculiarly modal world of the Eastern Mediterranean about 100 years ago.

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released October 31, 2022

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mystras records Boston, Massachusetts

Founded by Nikos Apostolos, Mystras Records releases old or unavailable or forgotten Greek-language and/or Byzantine-adjacent records for digital consumption.

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