The Rembetika Hipsters are a Canadian music group based in Calgary

Calgary

Calgary is a city in the Province of Alberta, Canada. It is located in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, approximately east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. They perform primarily Greek

Culture of Greece

The culture of Greece has evolved over thousands of years, beginning in Mycenaean Greece, continuing most notably into Classical Greece, through the influence of the Roman Empire and its Greek Eastern successor the Byzantine Empire...

 rebetiko

Rebetiko

Rebetiko, plural rebetika, , occasionally transliterated as Rembetiko, is a term used today to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek folk music which have come to be grouped together since the so-called rebetika revival, which started in the 1960s and developed further from the early...

 music, as well as composing original music and exploring styles from Epirus

Epirus (periphery)

Epirus , formally the Epirus Region , is a geographical and administrative region in northwestern Greece. It borders the regions of West Macedonia and Thessaly to the east, West Greece to the south, the Ionian Sea and the Ionian Islands to the west and the country of Albania to the north. The...

, known as Epirotika, Smyrnaiko music from the region now known as Izmir

Izmir

Izmir is a large metropolis in the western extremity of Anatolia. The metropolitan area in the entire Izmir Province had a population of 3.35 million as of 2010, making the city third most populous in Turkey...

, and Nisiotika

Nisiotika

Nisiotika is the name of the dances of Greek islands including a variety of Greek styles, played by ethnic Greeks in Greece, Cyprus, Australia, the United States and elsewhere....

 music of the Greek islands.

The band began in 1996 with Nikos Diochnos (bouzouki

Bouzouki

The bouzouki , is a musical instrument with Greek origin in the lute family. A mainstay of modern Greek music, the front of the body is flat and is usually heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The instrument is played with a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but...

, vocals) and Allen Baekeland (guitar and vocals). Giorgos Iosefelis plays bass guitar, Lincoln Frey adds clarinet

Clarinet

The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

 and melodeon

Melodeon (organ)

A melodeon is a type of 19th century reed organ with a foot-operated vacuum bellows, and a piano keyboard. It differs from the related harmonium, which uses a pressure bellows. Melodeons were manufactured in the United States sometime after 1812 until the Civil War era...

, Jonathan Lewis adds violin and baglamas and Malcolm Lim plays hand percussion instruments such as darbuke . Brigitte Dajczer also played and recorded the violin from 2000-2007. Other past members have included Danny Patton (bass), Ben Johnson (percussion), Jon Nordstrom (bass), and Edmond Agopian (violin).

The group has performed at music festivals, concert halls, and intimate venues across Canada. They have traveled to Greece twice to play, reunite with family, and learn about the culture. The Hipsters perform weekly on Wednesdays at Calgary's Pegasus restaurant, since 2003.

Discography

The band has three recorded albums:

• Dinner in Polidroso (released 2004)
• Architects of Narghile (released 2001)
• Kafeneion (released January 1,2011)

External links

• Rembetika Hipsters - official website