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Roza Eskenazi: canary of the AegeanIt’s a short song, but rich and intriguing. “My sweet canary,” it begins. “You took my mind./ In the morning you wake me/ When you sing so sweetly.” Although it’s sung in Greek, you get the drift even without a translation: there’s something hard and yearning in the voice of its singer, Roza Eskenazi, a mingling of desire, infatuation and pain.Eskenazi was the queen of rembetika, the Greek blues, a genre that sprang up in the Aegean’s port towns in the 1920s. She was a prodigious and prolific talent, revered for her soul and her charisma, as well as for giving a voice to the underclass: the displaced, the poor and the desperate. Yet until now, her music and the extraordinary details of her life have remained relatively unknown. This month, however, Eskenazi will be celebrated – in a new album that pays tribute to her music, and in a documentary film, My Sweet Canary, that tells the story of a life and a career that encompassed two world wars, an elopement, a long-lost son, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, German occupation, wartime resistance, imprisonment, and of course extraordinary music.
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Topic: The sweet canary (Read 4029 times)
