Vassilis Tsitsanis

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Vassilis Tsitsanis was a Greek composer and bouzouki player, born in 1915 in Trikala. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern rebetiko and laiko. In total he wrote more than five hundred songs. His family came from Epirus, and his colleagues sometimes called him the Vlach, because he was the only rebetiko player of his time who came from the mainland and not from the islands. From an early age he played violin, mandola and mandolin, instruments that recur in many of his songs.

Music and breakthrough

In 1936 he went to Athens to study law. A year later he had also learned to play the bouzouki and made his first recording. In 1938 he moved to Thessaloniki, where he did his military service and stayed for about ten years, including during the German occupation. There he became famous, opened an ouzeri, married and wrote many of his best songs. By the time the occupier closed the record companies in 1941, he had already recorded about a hundred songs of his own.

Influence

In 1946 he returned to Athens and recorded many of his own compositions, which made singers such as Sotiria Bellou, Marika Ninou, Ioanna Georgakopoulou and Prodromos Tsaousakis famous. He developed the Westernisation of rebetiko, brought it to large parts of the population and thus laid the foundation for the later laiko. He was a friend of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. On his sixty-ninth birthday in 1984 he died in London after a lung operation. All of Greece mourned.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1983Η Συναυλία Του Τσιτσάνη Στο Ηράκλειο Κρήτης
• 1985Θεοδωράκης - Τσιτσάνης - Κόκοτας
• 1987Hommage à Tsitsanis: bouzouki
• 1987Ο Γρηγόρης Μπιθικώτσης τραγουδά Βασίλη Τσιτσάνη
• 2001Hommage à Tsitsanis
• 2014Για Βρέφη
• ?Greek Popular Dances - Bouzoukia

Mentioned in other articles

• Rebetiko GenreAfter the war, Vassilis Tsitsanis made rebetiko popular throughout Greece.