A live set with D.K.

Back to this last series of posts with memory exercises, today I am writing about a live set with Dimitris Kremalis, which took place on the 16th July 2017 in Athens, in the friendly space Konstantinoupoleos aka Neverland of Vasilis Kritikos. I met Vasilis in 2011 when I moved from Thessaloniki to Athens in order to finish my studies in trumpet. At those years up until today, Vasilis was running Eilissos, a small theater with a capacity of around 30 seats, and in that time we met at the Social Conservatory of Athens, an association which provided music lessons free of charge to people who could not afford paying music schools. It was then the very beginning of the financial crisis in the country and music lessons belonged to one of the first things a poor family would stop. Vasilis offered his space and I taught the trumpet. We became very quickly friends and in between the lessons, which took place on the stage of Eilissos, he showed me his works in Photography, old films developed in the dark room, collages etc.

Dimitris is a friend from my first days in Athens, which I met by chance at the workshop of brass and woodwind instruments of Giorgos Paraschos (who unfortunately past away some years ago). While chatting there I told him that I was going to visit Germany for a month in the next days in search for a place to continue with my studies. As he knows Germany very well because of his juristic studies there, he guided me with tips and tricks. He came in the workshop with a trumpet he bought from a trumpet player of Frankfurt’s classical music scene and he was very happy about it – it was indeed a very nice instrument with two extra bells to exchange according to your needs on sound, response etc… At this moment he was looking for a teacher and I suggested him to start with my teacher Yiannis Karampetsos, who has a very good reputation and who is very respected both for his extraordinary technique (he studied among others with giants like Anthony Plog, Bo Nilson, Thomas Stevens, Pierre Thibaud and James Thomson) as well as for his musicality. We exchanged telephone numbers and we met again after a couple of months, when I came back from my journey and he had already started with the trumpet lessons.

Dimitris is a multiinstrumentalist with a superb intuition and a unique impulse to learn always new things. Not to mention that he is also a very good photographer. He plays among others electric guitar, trumpet, electronics and the musical saw (!). We planned the concert only some weeks before the date and we had no idea what we would play. Furthermore, I was nervous and excited because it would be a come-back concert after some four and a half years without me playing concerts in Greece. It worths mentioning here that the last time we met and played music with Dimirtis was in January 2013, only a couple of days before moving to Basel. Then I was invited by Dimitris to join his band Sempreviva, with whom we played covers and original songs and that evening was my good bye to Greece. Surprisingly, some days ago the video appeared in the suggestions of youtube. Thanks to Vasilis and his amazing engagement we can dig in our memory ! Voilà…