Jazz in Athens: Frustrated Cosmopolitans in a Music Subculture

The emergence of the “jazz neighbourhood” of Kerameikos in recession Athens

“…Big live shows provided extremely high incomes, in some cases rising up to 400 euros per night, but were nonetheless devalued by the majority of the musicians as "low-quality" music. These evaluations were not solely style-related, but signified two very different ontologies, as performing for the music industry was conceptualized as "work" while performing jazz was conceptualized as "play" (Tsioulakis, 2011). This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Greek jazz scene but has been also discussed in relation to the London jazz scene, as musicians in their effort to retain their creative autonomy have to deal with poor working conditions, signalling another distinction between "work" and "creativity" (Umney and Kretsos, 2014).…”

“…During an interview she claimed to have opened the club to help the refugees: https://www.politico.eu/article/greece-celebrity-pro-refugee-migrant-nightclub-lindsay-lohan-athens-migrationcrisis-europe-dennis-papageorgiou/.13 Pistes [plural of pista] literally means stage and is used to denote the venues of Greek popular musics, particularly of the laiko genre. For an ethnographic account of pistes in relation to modes of spectatorship seeTsioulakis (2019).14 My theorization of the live jazz scene of Athens as a subculture, continues in the same vein as the work ofTsioulakis (2011), drawing on the model of Slobin regarding the "superculture, interculture and subculture", rather than on a notion of subculture as related to deviancy and the working classes, as is the mostly the case with studies in sociology.http://epublishing.ekt.gr | e-Publisher: EKT | Downloaded at 11/05/2021 02:25:55 |…”

“…During the 1990s, apart from the venues, the magazine Jazz&Τζαζ was established as well as the radio station Jazz FM. For a thorough discussion of the history of jazz in the 1990s seeTsioulakis (2011) and for a historical account of jazz in Greece since the 1920s seePapadimitriou (2018). Further to the limited publications regarding jazz in Greece, the documentary Diamonds in the sky was released in 2019 by Meletis Miras, mapping the history of the Athenian radio station Jazz FM which was established in 1991.6 It is not within the scope of this section to provide an exhaustive list of all the jazz venues of the era.…”

The Quality of Mutuality: Jazz Musicians in the Athenian Popular Music Industry

“… See Cowan (1993) andPapanikolaou (2007).5 For a discussion of cosmopolitanism within the Athenian jazz subculture, seeTsioulakis (2011a).…”

“Stay in Synch!”: Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival Vassiliki Lalioti

“…My aim, however, in this paper is to contribute, on the one hand, to the study of electronic music, a current cultural phenomenon that has been ignored by Greek anthropology, 2 and, on the other hand, to a wider academic discussion on Greek music. Studies of Greek music have mainly focused either on folk/traditional genres (Herzfeld 1982;Kallimopoulou 2009), or on rebetiko (Tragaki 2007), but recently there is a growing interest in popular music genres and cultures, like éntehno (Papanikolaou 2007), laikó, (Dawe 2003) and jazz (Tsioulakis 2011), as well as in various artists, like Anna Vissi (Polychronakis 2007), which, placed in their social and cultural context, shed light on local and trans-local aspects of life and on a set of socio-cultural meanings in Greece today.…”