Farewell to the modern Greek music maker
The back cover described the 1967 album as a “colorful blend of demotic Greek songs with a modern sound and tempo.” And it was just that, with “Vasilikos tha Gino” performed on an electric guitar with fuzz and “Lemonaki Mirodato” delivered in the style of then-popular psychedelic shake.
This kind of alchemy was child’s play for Mimis Plessas, the celebrated Greek composer who died on October 5, just a week before he was to turn 100 years old, and was laid to rest at Athens’ First Cemetery on Wednesday. Perhaps that album was his personal way of “electrifying” traditional music, with its title, “Greece Goes Modern,” indicating that he had a broader audience in mind when he composed the tracks than simply a domestic one.
“I believe that this is one way to give our music international appeal and for young people too,” the composer says in a note that accompanied the album, which is now out of print.
“Reissuing it was extremely difficult, because as Mr Mimis himself had told us, the master pressing of ‘Greece Goes Modern’ had not been saved and the tapes of the original recording had been destroyed in a fire,” Dimitris Vassiliadis, the producer of B-otherside Records, which re-released the album three times, tells Kathimerini.
According to Vassiliadis, the album is so coveted by fans of the versatile Greek composer that a copy from 1967 can change hands for as much as 2,000 to 3,000 euros. There are also fewer in circulation in Greece than abroad, because, according to one rumor, the regime during the 1967-1974 military dictatorship had sent dozens of copies to the country’s embassies abroad so they could be offered as a diplomatic gift.
“We managed to track down five copies in Greece,” says Vassiliadis. “In order to remake the album, we had to transcribe them in the studio, second by second, so our sound engineer could pick out the best bits from each album and splice them together. When the album hit countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and France, we got loads of positive feedback from DJs and producers.”
Plessas himself had said that three factors were crucial to the album’s creation: his friendship with brewer Karolos Fix, who had asked him to create a new radio advertising campaign for his Fix beer, the Pan-Vox recording company’s willingness to back the project, and the contribution of another friend, painter and set designed Vassilis Fotopoulos, who designed the album cover. The band performing on the album was the Orbiters, with Plessas conducting and playing on his favorite Philicorda keyboards.
“It represents a harmonious coexistence between the modern and the traditional, where neither one nor the other is trying to take the lead,” says Vassiliadis, hailing Plessas’ “audacity” in taking deeply entrenched songs like “O Menousis” and “Karagouna” and giving them such an innovative twist.
One of the composer’s main associates speaks with equally admiring terms of Plessas’ ability to assimilate different influences.
“Mimis Plessas was like blotting paper: He could hear a melody, memorize it instantly and then go back home to work on it,” Lefteris Papadopoulos tells Kathimerini.
“He composed pleasant popular tunes but when he became interested in laiko, I took him to a bouzouki joint and he wrote ‘Vrexi Fotia sti Strata Mou,’” Papadopoulos says of an iconic song of the macho zeibekiko genre.
“He assimilated how this music was written very quickly.”
