There’s little doubt that Vasilis Tsitsanis was a musical genius.
After he arrived in Athens as a young man to study law, he started playing music to support himself and soon abandoned his studies. In 1937, the first song he wrote was recorded, and he soon wrote others that were covered by leading rebetiko musicians, including Markos Vamvakaris. Over the course of his life – he died in 1984 – Tsitsanis wrote and recorded hundreds of songs.
With Vamvakaris, Tsitsanis is acknowledged as a master of rebetiko, although much of his career after the 1940s — as a great songwriter, singer, orchestra leader, bouzouki player and recording executive — was spent helping to create and popularize the laiko music that succeeded rebetiko. It appealed to a wide Greek audience and took rebetiko into the mainstream.
(When I once admitted to a Greek friend I am not a huge fan of a lot of Tsitsanis’s later work, her response was “And all of Greece kicks Mark.”)
Tsitsanis’s early rebetiko work included this fine piece, In My Darkness, sung by Stratos Payioumtzis.
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