Aman molli: Benefit dinner & Special Concert – Asteris Varveris & Eirini Zogali

Saturday 3rd December 2022, Benefit dinner & Aman Molli special concert with Asteris Varveris (laouto, guitar, vocals) & Eirini Zogali (oud, bouzouki, vocals), music from Eastern Mediterranean tradition and Greek rebetiko. Doors open at 6.30 pm, music starts at 8 pm. After the concert, there will be a jam session, so you’re more than welcome to bring your instruments! Donations welcome.

Before the concert there will be a 3 course dinner served as of 18:30. Any earnings will support the medical expenses of our 6yo fella Stefanos in Athens who is going through a sequence of surgeries. For more details about the cause, or alternative ways to support it, please ask the Aman Molli crew on Saturday.

Asteris Varveris and Eirini Zogali count six years of performing together as a duo. What started with purely rebetiko repertoire, led to experimentation of several eastern Mediterranean traditions and with different instruments! From guitar to laouto and from bouzouki to oud. Asteris and Eirini find a way to perform music that coordinates with them, with rebetiko being always their most important starting point. In the first part of the concert, the duo will present new compositions of the Eastern Mediterranean tradition, and new arrangements of traditional melodies of Greece. In the second part, the rebetiko will take over until the end of the performance.

What is rebetiko? It’s a greek urban folk music that was created in the 1920s and blossomed until the ’60s, with thousands of gramophone recordings that have been left behind for the new generations to represent it and study it. The main instruments of the genre are folk guitar and greek bouzouki.

Aman Molli is an open collective workshop for modal music, broadly defined as music following melodic pathways that are outside the two standardized Western scales and associated harmonies. Instruments and Music Styles Any kind of acoustic instrument (Strings, percussions, wind, voice). Many of the instruments used today (guitars, bouzoukia etc.) have even-tempered tuning so the maqams/dromoi are not the traditional Arabic/Turkish/Persian microtonal versions but the westernized adaptations. One of the objectives is to explore the differences. In the same spirit, we add harmonic structure (in guitars or mpaglama chords etc) where possible.On the rhythm side we explore the various characteristics rhythms of these regions/musical tradition (9/8 etc.).