Maria Dimitriadi was a brilliant singer. Born in 1951 in Athens, she made a risky visit in 1968 to Mikis Theodorakis, then under house arrest at the seaside resort at Vrahati, breaking through the police presence surrounding his home. Mikis gave her his songs, and urged her to go abroad and join Maria Farantouri and his band, to let the world know what was going on in Greece. She did, and for several years toured Europe with Mikis' band (and with Mikis when the junta allowed him to leave the country), and recorded some of his most-beloved anti-junta songs of the period. But at Mikis' side, she always stood in Maria Farantouri's shadow, always the "other Maria".
Dimitriadi really came into her own with the fall of the dictatorship, when Thanos Mikroutsikos, a new composer, chose her as his muse. She was the princip[al] singer on his first 6 albums, issued in 1975-79. Mikroutsikos introduced jazz and rock elements into Greek pop music, and these early works were very political -- songs with lyrics by Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet, East German dissident Wolf Birman, Greek communist Yannis Ritsos, Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others. Maria embodied the genre of "political song" which dominated the early post-junta years. She sang at demonstrations and rallies, on picket lines with striking workers, at leftwing youth festivals.
These were the songs of my late teens and early college years, when I was fervently energized by the communist ideals which swept up Greek youth (even though I lived here in the U.S.). While my fellow students at OSU listened to Springsteen (someone I would not discover til I'd been out of college for 4-5 years), Rush, and who knows who else, I was listening to Dimitriadi singing her red heart out, singing songs about Roza Luxembourg, about executed Greek communists, about peasant rebellions in Spain, about how "the whole world would become red". I saw Maria perform live a few times, once in 1978 at a stadium rally to send off the Greek delegation to the International Youth Festival in Cuba, where she and Mikroutsikos debuted their "Songs of Freedom", later that summer at the Communist Youth Festival in Athens, and a couple of years later at a small club in Thessaloniki the winter that I attended the University there, where I sat at a table right up against the stage. (Somewhere I have a cassette tape I recorded of that show, though I have no idea where it is, it's been twenty-five years or more since I last listened to it.). A couple of years later, I saw her perform with Manos Hadjidakis at another small club beneath the Acropolis.
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