The Greek Music Ensemble, in collaboration with drummer/percussionist and Berklee alumnus Kostas Milonas, the Tsitsanis Museum, and the Municipality of Trikala-Greece, presents a concert celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Vasilis Tsitsanis. 

Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915-1984), the legendary Greek songwriter and bouzouki player, became one of the leading Greek composers of his time and is widely regarded as one of the founders of post-World-War II “Rebetiko” and “Laiko” genres of Greek music. He wrote more than 500 songs and is still remembered as an extraordinary composer and bouzouki player.

Rebetiko is a term used to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek folk music. Although nowadays treated as a single genre, Rebetiko is, musically speaking, a synthesis of elements of European music, the music of the various areas of the Greek mainland and the Greek islands, Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical chant, often referred to as Byzantine music, and the modal traditions of Ottoman art music and café music.

Among many contributions to Greek music, Tsitsanis succeeded in taking Rebetiko out from a decades-old “subculture” status, giving it a new poetic and musical form and situating it in the new social and political reality of Greece after the Second World War.