Anastasia Tsioulcas is a New York-based music journalist and critic. She is the classical music columnist for Billboard Magazine, and her work is syndicated internationally by Reuters. She also writes about classical music, world music and jazz, for a variety of mainstream and special-interest publications, including O (The Oprah Magazine), Travel & Leisure, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, Gramophone, Chamber Music America, Jazz Times, and Down Beat, among other outlets.
In addition, Anastasia is a regular on-air contributor to such public radio programs as the nationally distributed "Weekend America" and WNYC-FM's “Morning Edition” and "Soundcheck." She also frequently serves as a program annotator and pre-concert panel moderator for such institutions as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. As a record producer, her credits include a critically acclaimed retrospective album of recordings by famed sitar player Ravi Shankar entitled Bridges: The Best of Ravi Shankar on Private Music (BMG).
She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, with a degree in comparative religion.
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Why "Cafe Aman"?
Within the tradition of rembetika song, "aman" is a term used to convey deep feelings of pain, love, and loss, rather the same way "Mercy!" comes up in blues songs. In many of the great early rembetika songs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a whole genre called "amanedhes" sprang up, in which very gifted singers would sing rhymed couplets that were interspersed with improvised, melismatic, extended melodic lines on the word "aman."
Before long, "Cafe Amans"--cafes and bars where musicians would gather to perform--had sprung up in rembetika-loving cities and towns across the region, including Athens, Piraeus, Smyrna (Izmir), and Istanbul.
