At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe is living in peace and prosperity. The “Belle Époque” is an outgrowth of previous important historical events and developments. The networks that are created and which evolve funnel both people and their products, tangible and intangible. It is within this multi-layered world that sound recording and sound reproduction is invented. Early record labels send mobile crews literally all over the world to record local musicians. The range of the repertoire is endless. Cosmopolitanism in large urban centers favors polystylisms and polymorphisms. Colonialism, revolutions, conflicts, refugee flows; the theater, cinema, radio, photography, orchestras’ tours, but also circulations in all kinds of commercial channels in a world that evolves dynamically and anisotropically, form a complex network of “centers” and “peripheries” in alternating roles setting musical idioms in motion, both literally and figuratively. The networks in which the Greek-speaking musics participate, constantly conversing with their co-tenants, are magnificent. Discography has already provided important tools in understanding the relationships that developed between “national” repertoires. The result of this ongoing research is “Cosmopolitanism in Greek Historical Discography”.

We stumble upon wandering musical tunes in various places in Europe, Africa, Asia and America, where local musicians appropriate and reconstruct them. In addition to these, the mutual influences concern the performance practices, the instrumentation, the rhythm, the harmonization, the vocal placement and, in general, the habits that each musician carries in him/her. Repertoires are deterritorialized and mixed with others, which take on supralocal characteristics. Musicians are often on the move within multicultural empires, serving diverse repertoires and coming from heterogeneous ethno-cultural groups.

Naturally, in the large urban centers of the Ottoman Empire around the Mediterranean Sea, the “conversations” of the Greek-speakers with their Turkish-speaking Muslim “co-tenants”, the Catholic Greek-speakers, the Armenians, the Sepharadi and Ashkenazi Jews, the Levantine Protestants, and the Europeans and the Americans, were more than intense. The relevant evidence demonstrates the musical exchanges between them and elucidate an ecumene where everyone contributed to the great musical “melting-pot”, and where everyone may draw from it, as well as redeposit it, in a new form, with a reformulated text and its meaning, with sometimes clear and sometimes blurred references to its pre-text, until someone else pulls it out again, through the “melting-pot”, so that it becomes clear that there is no end in this recreational and dynamic process where fluidity prevails.

Within these networks, already existing tendencies and aesthetic currents such as exoticism are often created or integrated, especially during the period when the phenomenon of sound recording and reproduction takes on commercial, mass and universal dimensions. The song "To charemi sto chamam" (The harem in the hammam) aptly outlines this dialectical, multi-layered relationship between the various “national” repertoires and aesthetic trends and currents:

The tune of the song can also be found in the Armenian repertoire that was recorded in America. More specifically, around 1927, the Armenian Edward Boghosian (Էդուարդ Պողոսյան) records the song "Harsin douvin" with Gulazian's Orchestra, in New York, for the record label Pharos (Pharos 320 - P550). In the 1940s Edward Boghosian re-recorded the composition in New York under the title “Hars Yev Gesoor” (Metropolitan 7011A).

The case of the Turkish band "Hüsnü Özkartal Orkestrası", which released in 1972 the record "Çağdaş Oyun Havaları" (Regal LRZTX 720), is extremely interesting. Included in this record is the instrumental song "Şu Derenin Suları", which is based on the tune in question. The band is part of the popular at the time trend in Turkey called "Anadolu pop", or "Anatolian rock". Western popular musics has already traveled east, and has had a profound effect on musicians there. The latter combine aesthetics, styles, instruments, forms, giving shape to new, extremely interesting syncretic musical products.

Earlier, in 1935, Anestis Delias recorded the melody, attaching the performative style of the so-called "Piraeus style" and creating one of the most characteristic examples of exoticism in said style, as it describes a scene from the imaginary East.

In the era of discography, the advance of exoticism is irresistible and leaves a very strong imprint. However much it seems to be defined by the principle of "locality", exoticism is a global aesthetic constant, a "common" language of the new age strongly marked by modernism and inscribed in a complex and lengthy process of osmosis among "national" musicians, which produces repertoires with "ecumenical" or global characteristics.

The locations represented in exoticism, that is, the East, Latin America, Spain, Hawaii, are par excellence imaginary, disconnected from the real world. They are revealed like a theatrical stage, with alternating scenes, where fantasies are dramatized, overwhelm the senses and release intense emotions, offering the "visitor" an ideal experience, outside the limitations of the conventional world: an eternal feast, pleasures, adventure.

At the center of the Eastern stage (which is always represented as Islamic) stands the palace, synonymous with pleasures and opulence, within which every imaginable intemperance is put into practice. Violent and despotic pashas, maharajas and sheikhs enjoy lavishness while indulging in proverbial laziness. The figure that dominates the ethnoscape of the East is certainly the female, an object of desire. Through a series of roles, almost exclusively leading ones, women embody the mysticism, eroticism and sensuality of the imaginary East. The ultimate symbol of lust, a trademark of the East, is none other than the harem (Lewis, 2004: 12-52). The slavery of the female body contributes decisively to the ethnoscape of the East, bringing the narrator face to face with transcendental acts of heroism. In the East, calendar time is polarized, with the atmosphere almost always described as nocturnal. Darkness is a powerful symbol of escalating emotional tension, as it is synonymous with a metaphysical fog.

Some of the above stereotypes serve the construction of the imaginary East by Delias: the pashas enjoy feasting and the amorous pleasures lavishly offered by the harem. The "appropriation" of the exotic feast is also interesting, as the bouzouki plays a central role ("make them dance and play bouzouki for him").

This recording is a re-release in New York (see here), from the one recorded in Athens, in 1935 (Columbia CG1308 – DG6165).

Anastasios Dellios (Smyrna [Izmir], 1912 – Drapetsona, July 31, 1944), as was his real name, lived his childhood in one of the great urban centers of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna, which from the middle of the 19th century emerged as the most dynamic economic center of the Near East and in one of the most important centers of emergence of a wonderful cultural pluralism. He came to Greece around 1920. In 1934, he frequented Markos Vamvakaris, Giorgos Batis and Stratos Pagioumtzis forming the "Famous Quartet of Piraeus", and was one of the central figures of the "Piraeus style" rebetiko.

Research and text: George Evangelou, Leonardos Kounadis and Nikos Ordoulidis