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When middle-class Americans in the 1950s found that they could get access to a tape recorder and a microphone, it then became possible for them to make recordings that they could pay to have pressed into discs. One didn't need to go to dedicated recording studios, most of which had been for decades in the cosmopolitan centers - first New York, then Chicago, then the temporary make-shift, studios set up in hotel rooms Georgia, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia, or the independent studios in Grafton WI, Richmond IN, Los Angeles, etc. It was part of a process of decentralization of the business of making records that exploded into thousands of small labels quickly sprouting up and, more often that not, just as quickly collapsing through the 1940s, the last days of the 78rpm disc in the '50s, and the parallel emergence of the microgroove 45 and 33rpm formats. Regional bands playing musics in an enormous number of vernacular styles seized the opportunity to include themselves in the marketplace of home entertainment for their own communities.
To get a picture of those communities and of the kinds of music being played and enjoyed in them, one has to encounter the discs themselves. Easier said than done. Of the eight discs presented on this collection, at least half have so far survived without either a trace or a whiff of the fact of the existence anywhere on the digital megamind. So, here was are, "fixing" that as if the potential of them as an experience might open a door to something for someone somewhere.
Meanwhile, if you run into any more discs by Costas Kamanis, send em on over. They're bound to be very good.
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George L. Pontikos was born in Cleveland on June 21, 1914, the second of four children. His father Louis (b. Sept. 14, 1882) a painting contractor, was one of the founders of the Greek community of Cleveland and an active member of many fraternal organizations including the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association of which he and his wife Clara were co-founders. The family lived in the Tremont neighborhood on W. 10th St. A violinist, George was playing publicly by 1937. He was married in September 1941, shortly before a 13-month stint in the Army. Newspapers in surrounding states as far away as South Carolina and Iowa remarked with amusement that his wife Mary (b. 1921) only had to change her surname by one letter from her maiden name Ponticos to Pontikos. They had a son whom they named Louis after George's dad. Through the ‘50s and into the early ‘60s George’s Athenian Ensemble played in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. On February 15, 1953, George’s father Louis died suddenly of a heart attack at the 1,000-room Hotel Cleveland where George’s band was playing. Louis’s obituary in The Plain Dealer said that Louis had “expressed the wish to die while listening to his son’s orchestra.” Like his father, George was a member of the AHEPA, several other Greek fraternal organizations, and the Masons. In his later years, he worked in sales at the Myers Meat Company. He died at the age of 58 on Jan. 8, 1973. His band was so fondly remembered that not only was it the headline of his obituary, but it was also mentioned in the obituary of his sister Helen when she died almost 20 years later.
Ann Marvis (b. Cleveland, March 14, 1929; d. Chagrin Falls, Aug. 26, 2016) who sings of half of the Pontikos sides studied at the Carnegie Institute of Music. She got married in October 1955. It appears that Pontikos’s self-released recordings, seemingly all of which are presented on this album, were made before then.
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Michael George Pantelis was born May 5, 1886, on the island Symi. A seaman, he arrived in Tarpon Springs, Florida at the age of 10 in 1906 and was naturalized as an American citizen on July 9, 1913. At the age of 38 when he was living in Washington D.C. he made a brief return journey to Symi during which his son was conceived.
On April 16, 1947, at the age of 60, he returned to Greece again. His then 20-year-old son Gabriel Patelis Pantelides (b. Feb. 1, 1928 on Symi), wasn living in Athens. Father and son returned together to the U.S., living first at 2024 I St. NW in Washington before Gabriel relocated to Greektown in east Baltimore, Maryland, where he lived on Eastern Ave. Gabriel played accordion.
Gabriel made a return journey to Athens for three months in 1952, about the same time he was married to his first wife Elaine (with whom he had two children, Cathy and Michael G.), and again for two months in 1955. The two impossibly scare 78rpm discs that he made appear to have been recorded shortly after that second trip. The credited accompanists were New Yorkers associated with the Kalos Discos label which had for several years included the young bouzouki player Nick Pourpourakis who, coincidentally, had a sister in Baltimore. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, he performed around Baltimore and D.C., as far north as Wilmington, Delaware, and as far south as Newport News in the tidewater of Virginia, a port like Baltimore that was a regular stop for Greek merchant marines. Around 1959 he made an LP. A note on the rear panel of its jacket describes the group as “specializing in Greek, Turkish, Arabian, and Italian Folk Music” and asks the audience to “Please give us 3-4 months time,” but he never released anything else.
Around the time the album came out he and his family had moved from Greektown to the northern suburbs of Towson and Lutherville-Tinomium. They later had a second home in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Elaine was an organizer of Greek-American activities in Baltimore through the 1970s and ‘80s. She died Dec. 21, 1998. Gabriel Pantelides died on May 15, 2024. He still has family in and around Baltimore including his second wife Joanne, four grandchildren, and many others including a musician nephew.
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Oudist Costas M. Kamanis (a.k.a. Costas Karatza) was born in mid-September 1913 on Chios. He married a woman named Rothope (maiden name Chicklakis, b. 1924 in Somerville MA), and they settled south of Boston, first in Dedham, then in Hyde Park. He self-released at least three (probably four) discs on his own Hellenic Dawn label in the ‘50s. In 1956 his band played the day-long convention of the Daughters of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association in Norwich, Connecticut. In 1964 they played at the semi-formal ball held by the St George Greek Orthodox Church in Bangor, Maine. In the ’60s he was a cook at eateries including Jimmy’s Harbor Side and Charlie’s Deli. The Boston-area Greek dance and music expert Joseph Graziosi shared many memories of Kamanis including having seen him perform in the late '70s on Sunday afternoons at the Averoff restaurant in Cambridge. Graziosi recalls Kamanis's special master of amanadhes (vocal improvisations) and that Kamanis sent him a cassette of excellent oud taxims (instrumental improvisations). Kamanis told Graziosi that as a young man in Chios, he had played with a group of Asia Minor refugees from Gioul Baxe on the Erythraia coast. Kamanis was also friends with the Nikos Pourpourakis who was also from Chios (the small island of Oinousses) and of Asia Minor descent. Costas died April 30, 1994; Rothope died Sept. 19, 2004. Although we have few facts available to us about his musical career, it was apparently central to their lives. The grave marker they share in West Roxbury shows two joined hearts under an oud.
The guitarist who accompanies Kamanis on one of his discs, Arthur Marathas, was born April 27, 1923, in Lowell, MA, married a woman named Joanne Spanos in 1951, and died Oct. 2, 2003, in Winthrop.
The clarinet player Costas Gadinis (b. Siasta, Nov. 14, 1890; d. Kozani April 21, 1959) who appears on at least one of Kamanis's discs was a virtuoso and one of the most widely recorded Greek-American musicians of the first half of the 20th century, regularly billed in the ‘40s and ‘50s as “the Greek Benny Goodman.” A story circulates that Goodman himself gave him the title. The composer and saxophonist Joe Maneri later titled a recording in his honor.
credits
released September 11, 2024
Credited Performers:
Tracks 1-8 Cleveland, Ohio
George Pontikos, violin
Ann Marvis, voice (tracks 1, 3, 5, 7)
Tracks 9-12 Baltimore, Maryland
Gabriel Pantelides, accordion & voice
Petros Nikolaou, bouzouki (credited as “bouz-githara”)
Andreas Poggis, violin & band leader
Giannina, voice (track 11)
supported by 21 fans who also own “Hellenic Hinterlands: Independent Greek-American 78rpm Discs from Baltimore, Boston, and Cleveland ca. 1953-57”
My wife and i were lucky to hang out with taarab musicians in Zanzibar many years ago . We fell in love with the music and the people . Thankyou so much ! dlmayers
A lost classic of Greek jazz, this collection of songs threads snakelike melodies through a bubbling cauldron of drums. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 8, 2019
