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Artist
Tsaous was born in 1893 in Kastamoni in the Pontus (Black Sea coastal) area of Asia Minor. As a citizen of the Ottoman Empire he completed his military service in the Ottoman army, attaining the rank of sergeant. [1] After the Asia Minor catastrophe, he came to Greece as a refugee and settled in Piraeus. He worked initially as a tailor for some years, before opening an ouzeri. He and his wife died in 1942 of food poisoning during the famine caused by the Italo-German occupation. Much of the information on his life comes from descendants of his sister-in-law. Yovan Tsaous is particularly noted for the unique instruments he played. They were custom-built for him in Piraeus by the luthier Kyriakos Peismatoglou, and differed in one important respect from other plucked long-necked lutes in use in Greece at this time, in that they were not fretted according to the equal temperament division of the octave into twelve identical semitones. Instead they[2] had sixteen frets to the octave, which permitted, among other things, the playing of microtonally different intervals such as the so-called three-quarter tone, and the neutral third, at certain positions on the fretboard. We know of at least three instruments, of which two have survived to the present day. The smallest was called baglamas although it did not resemble the instrument known by that name in the rebetiko context, being considerably larger, and in fact rather corresponding to what Greeks call tzourás. The next in size was
Rembetika. Songs of the Greek Underground 1925-1947
Rembetika: Songs of the Greek Underground 1925-1947
Rembetika: Songs of the Greek Underground: 1925-1947 (disc 1)
Rembetika: Songs of the Greek Underground: 1925-1947
Rembetika, Songs of the Greek Underground 1925-1947
Rembetika-Songs Of The Greek Underground 1925-1947