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Artist
Aris San
12+ albums
Greek60sIsraeli RockisraeliPsychedelic Rock
about
Aris San (1940 - 1992) was a famous Greek singer who immigrated to Israel and was one of the first to use electric guitar in a Greek music setting. "The status of popular Eastern music changed dramatically in the 1960s, with the eruption of the โGreekโ wave of popular music in Israel. โGreek popular musicโ in this context should be understood as the sound of hybrid nightclub music styles from Athens and Thessaloniki, generally referred to as laika (DeBoer 1996). A dominant feature of this sound is the presence of the bouzouki. This type of Greek music became a favorite style for Israeliborn Eastern Jews as well as for many non-Easterners. This wave is particularly connected to the rise to stardom of Greek singer Aris San. A seventeen-year-old non-Jew from Thessaloniki, San began to frequent Israel after 1956 and to appear in clubs in the port city of Haifa, which was populated by many Jews of Greek origin. Following a love affair with an Israeli girl, San settled in Israel and began to appear at the main venue of Greek music in Israel, the Arianna nightclub in Jaffa, owned by Shmuel Barzilay, a Thessalonician Jew. General Moshe Dayan, at the peak of his political power and popularity in the 1960s, is said to have been a fan of Aris San and even to have intervened to formalize the singerโs legal status. Aris Sanโs success and that of other contemporary Greek singers who landed in Israel was not a total breakthrough because the presence of Greek popular music in Israel predat
