Kostas Roukounas was born in 1903 on Samos, an Aegean island in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Within in the first 20 years of his life the First World War would occur, the Young Turks would rise, the newly minted "Greek" State would go to war with the last gasp of the Ottoman Empire and the first inhalation of the Turkish State, Smyrna would burn to the ground, and a "population exchange" between the Orthodox Christians of Asia and the Sunni Muslims of Europe would occur, leaving much bloodshed and a flood of Orthodox refugees in mainland Greece, laying the groundwork for the Rebetiko musical genre Kostas would excel in.

It's noted on Kostas's Wikipedia profile that he was well-known in particular for "his renditions of the most demanding technically and semi-improvisational manedes," of which this LP highlights. (Note: In English this genre has been referred to as the amanes, manes, manedes, amanedes (in Greek the former two would be romanized iterations of the singular, the latter of the plural).)

The amanes is distinct in the Greek folk repertoire that make up the majority of Rebetiko. Having said that, the amanes isn't quite as distinct, in theory or execution, when placed adjacent with the ecclesiastical music of the Byzantine Chant of the Orthodox church. In fact, there are a few trends present in both I'd like to note briefly.

The amanes takes its name from the exclamation of "Aman!" that listeners will no doubt familiarize themselves with if/when listening to the record. The piece of prose poetry that's sung is interspersed with these exclamations of "Aman!" in a melismatic fashion. Unlike the Byzantine chant, which contains both syllabic and melismatic vocalizations, the amanes is almost always melismatic (i.e. more than one musical note will apply to a syllable).

While the Wikipedia quote above is uncited it's nevertheless accurate in its notion that the amanes is semi-improvisational. Improvisational in the sense the notes Kostas sings are not fixed, however, they remain within a set of parameters. While the amanes is untimed, it's not quite, say, Free Jazz. The title of an amanes song will often read "Hijaz Manes", "Ousak Manes", etc. In the Ottoman milieu of Kostas these titles would reference the maqam of Turkish and Arabic musicians; to the Rum Millet, they may have known them as (Byzantine) Echoes; to the Greek Rebetiko musicians in mainland Greece they would be called Dromoi—Roads.

We would call them scales. But they don't function in quite the way scales function in Western music. For one, they're "microtonal," based on octaves that contain 72 tones as opposed to the 12 well-tempered tones of the Western octave. For two, the image of the scale makes us think of ... ladders? Maybe? Something to climb? These scales were originally called Echoes perhaps for a reason—because they were natural reverberations, not necessarily fixed in the same way we think of static notes. (My interpolation.)

So what we're listening to when Kostas sings an amanes is a set of fractional tones (the Hijaz, the Ousak, etc) being continually recombined. Mathematically, we might call what Kostas is singing an audible fractal—a series of self-similar combinations of fractional tones.

But the amanes is not a purely vocal music. The introduction and interludes consist of instrumental sections (by bouzouki, lyra, oud, etc). And these instruments take the same Maqam/Echo/Road that Kostas sings, taking the same set of fractional tones and continually recombining them. So while each successive line Kostas sings resembles itself in a self-similar way, each line played by the instrumentalist resembles both itself and Kostas in self-similar way. Each line by Kostas then resembling itself and the instrumentalist, etc etc.

Behind both the instrumentalist and the vocalist a simple, static bassline is usually played (although some amanedes are acapella). We might equate this bassline with the ison drone of the Byzantine chant. In any case, it's indicative of the Rebetiko tendency of layering European polyphony into the Eastern monophonic tradition.

Despite its emotional resonance and musical virtuosity, the amanes fell out of favor by the mid-20 Century for largely political reasons—although it still exists in pockets on modern Greek YouTube. Kostas was one of the most talented vocalists of his generation to execute the form, and this LP is one of the few non-compilation remnants of a genre that remains compositionally sui generis.

-Nikos