I don’t remember how I came into possession of it, but one of my very favourite MP3s is a raucous recording of Μπαξέ Τσιφλίκι (Mpaxe Tsifliki), a popular tune composed by the famous bouzoukist Βασίλης Τσιτσάνης (Vassilis Tsitsanis). I acquired the file more than 20 years ago, and according to the ID3 tags (which may or may not be accurate) the recording dates to 1997. But unfortunately, most of the other important metadata fields, including the artist and album, are missing. The length of the track is 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
Can anyone help me find the name of the performer so that I can hear some more of their work? MusicBrainz’s acoustic fingerprinting software doesn’t seem to recognize this track. A title search turns up dozens of other recordings of the same song. For the ones whose length is unknown or about the same as my version, I tried to look them up on YouTube (by searching for “Μπαξέ Τσιφλίκι” plus the name of the performer), but the ones that are available there don’t match my version.
Maybe someone else here recognizes the recording, or knows some bouzouki-loving friend who does, or has access to other acousting fingerprinting software that can be run on it…
Yes, and likewise their ντ (“nt”) represents the English /d/ sound, and γκ (“gk”) represents the English /g/ sound. We just got back from a holiday in Greece a few days ago and it amused us to no end seeing all the restaurant menus offering all-dressed "chot ntogk"s and “mpanana” splits for dessert.
For the hell of it I tried googling the tune name. An odd variation on the spelling was suggested:
“mp baxe tsifliki”
using that in the search and looking at the “all” results, the videos that popped up on the top included a version that was 2:51 in length. Maybe that’s your version?
Today I was finally able to locate the source of this recording, though plenty of mysteries remain.
The recording is the first track on Side A of the album Bouzouki My Love, Volume II, which someone has helpfully uploaded to YouTube:
Unfortunately, I can’t find any reliable information regarding the year this album was released, nor who the performer is.
The description for the YouTube video implies that the album is from the 1970s, though that’s probably just a guess on the part of the uploader.
There is an entry for the album on Discogs that lists a couple vinyl releases by the label Discophon (one in Greece, the other in the US), and provides images of the album sleeve and disc labels. Unfortunately, there’s no artist, nor any copyright or release date, printed on the sleeve or labels. I’m guessing the album was actually released in the mid-1960s, judging from (a) the style of the cover artwork, (b) the fact that most of the other Discophon albums for which Discogs does have release dates were released between 1963 and 1967, and (c) the back cover’s advertisement for a similar record, with a lower catalogue number, that one customer seems to have bought at the 1964 World’s Fair. There are some other websites out there claiming (albeit without providing any evidence) that the album was released in 1966.
It might be impossible to discover who performed the music on this album. It looks like Discophon was a small label whose business model was hiring session musicians to record covers of Greek pop/folk songs to be sold to foreign tourists in Greece, or to world music fans in the USA and other countries.
