I happened upon the 1988 documentary “Music of the Outsiders” on YouTube. Here’s the first of seven magnificent parts:

I’ve been entangled with re[m]betika since… well, when? I suppose I first heard of the genre as ‘rebetika’ about 30 years or so ago, but my taste for Greek music goes back much further, to the early 1950s when I used to listen to Greek and Armenian music on AM radio. When I was in college in the early 1960s I had a few Greek records, most notably the Folkways “Songs and Dances of Greece” (1953, and a mix of ‘folk’ and urban styles, but without the disreputable rebetika, or the Levantine smyrnaica). I got Gail Holst’s Road to Rembetika (1975) in 1980 or so, and in the early 1980s I bought a lot of vinyl reissues of rebetika 78s, and a mountain of CD reissues once the material started to appear in that format. I also got my hands on the Costas Ferris film “Rembetiko” (1984) Watch this bit for the flavor, and this too:

and I’ve collected books and articles more or less systematically. Being unable to read or understand Greek is the main stumbling block to further development –there’s only so much that translations of lyrics can tell you, especially when their language is nuanced argot. But I have thousands, literally, of MP3s, and there’s a fine array of video on YouTube… and Spotify has tons…

Looking through the New Yorker that arrived today (July 25), I saw an illustration of monster mandolinist Chris Thile and discovered that he’s released a new album Sleep With One Eye Open. I’d just finished reading a Fretboard Journal interview of Chris, done by Dave Grisman, so I was already in Thile-mindspace and it occurred to me to check Spotify… and sure enough, there’s the album. And it’s dynamite, highest-octane bluegrass in duet form (with Michael Daves, guitar). I note that the Amazon MP3 comes with a pdf of the booklet, the first such that I’ve noticed. And some searching turns up the duo’s website, with a YouTube video of an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert:

…and even if you don’t watch the embedded video, don’t miss a particularly hot mandolin break (keep watching for the second mandolin break too). And there’s more video on their website, too.

I was showing my friend Rob the manifold wonders of Spotify and he started asking questions about searching… something the Librarian should have considered in greater detail than he had heretofore done. I’m not surprised to discover that searches like label:ECM and genre:Acadian are effective. Indeed, there’s a Google Docs spreadsheet of 944 current Spotify ‘genre’ labels (but the categories are pretty arbitrary). Spotify’s own Advanced Search Syntax gives Operators (OR, AND, NOT) and Parameters (album:, genre:, label:, mbid: –the latter being the MusicBrainz ID– and others). I perceive that I’m barely scratching the surface here…

Missing in Spotify (and in direct MP3 purchases) is what we used to call the “liner notes” (etymology? did they line the cardboard LP jackets? or what?), a usually-valuable source of information about an album’s contents. Someday somebody will gather up those texts and/or image files, much as people are now digitizing and releasing old tech mags. I notice that quite a few of the European sources for (perhaps-legal-perhaps-not) .rar files of albums do routinely include scans of accompanying notes. I guess I’m assuming that the mainstream consumers of mostly-pop MP3s are perceived to be not interested in album art or narrative detail. Over the years I’ve learned a lot from liner notes, and I miss them.

I’m continuing to find remarkable depth in Spotify, and wondering if there’s a way to send the audio stream from my desktop to the kitchen Roku (which plays my iTunes library happily enough). In the Windows world, Jamcast seems to be the solution, but I don’t see a Mac analog. Of course I could just plug the iPhone (with its Available Offline content from Spotify) directly into the little Bose unit that the Roku Soundbridge is hooked to…