Apostolos Kaldaras, one of the great Greek composers of the 20th Century, was born in 1922 in Trikala and, as he came of age in the mid-1930s, was taken first by the music of the Asia Minor refugees and then by the sound of the bouzouki and rebetiko music.
In the post-WWII years he abandoned his studies in Thessaloniki to devote himself to playing and writing music. He relocated to Athens and scored two early successes: The Mangas Go for a Walk, recorded by Markos Vamvakaris and Vasilis Tsitsanis, in 1946, and Night Has Fallen Without a Moon a year later. Both are classics.
In the early 1950s, he met the young Stelios Kazantzidis and wrote the first song Kazantzidis recorded. He also began working with the noted lyricist Eftichia Papagiannopoulou (subject of the marvellous film Eftyhia from 2019). Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, he wrote hundreds of songs – some report that he wrote more than 1,500 songs in his life – that were hits for the stars of the day.
In the 1970s, he began working with the younger singers, beginning with the hugely influential album Asia Minor, recorded by George Dalaras and Haris Alexiou.
Kaldaras died after lengthy battle with cancer in 1990.
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