Ledio Cakaj relates how the “romantic longing” of Laïko sustained him as an undocumented Albanian teenager, living and working in Patras and Athens in the mid-90s
Dimitris Mitropanos' 1978 album, Parapono
Laïko (meaning ‘of the people’) is the popular music that has nursed Greek heartbreak since the middle of the 20th century. It grew out of rebetiko, the raw, syncopated music of Greeks displaced by the catastrophic population exchange with Turkey in the 1920s. The bouzouki, that pear-shaped long-necked lute, carried the music alongside its smaller cousin the baglama. By the 50s, composers like Vasilis Tsitsanis began pulling the genre toward the mainstream, and it emerged over the following decades into various strains: the heavy, lamenting style of Stelios Kazantzidis, the orchestral grandeur of...
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