Takis Lavidas, sanoturi player, composer and lyricist, is another musician who don’t have much of an online profile beyond his songs.
The reason is pretty straight-forward, though. He’s overshadowed by his very famous daughter Eleni Vitali, possibly my favourite Greek singer. Online, I can learn when and where Eleni was born, but little about her father.
What I have learned: Lavidas and his wife, singer Lucy Karageorgiou, performed at festivals throughout Greece in 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. At the same time, he was writing songs – music and lyrics – that were recorded by leading performers. He also played santouri on some of those. (The santouri is the Greek version of a hammered dulcimer. It was primarily a folk instrument that wasn’t commonly played on rebetiko and laiko songs.)
Lavidas was Roma and while there is a major presence of Roma musicians in Greek folk music, there were fewer working in rebetiko and laiko music.
The site stixoi.info (stixoi is the Greek word for lyrics) attributes 28 compositions to Lavidas, and on YouTube there are others where is credited with lyrics only. The singers of those songs read like the A-list of artists: Stelios Kazantzidis, Sotiria Bellou, Vangelis Perpiniadis…. And two of the songs list his daughter Eleni as the artist.
And as well as writing for others, Lavidas recorded his own sanoturi pieces, many of them instrumental folk recordings.
A cloudy dawn was recorded by Sotiria Bellou in 1953 with Lavidas (composer of the piece) on santouri.
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