DC Cafe Aman in Concert Featuring Spyros Koliavasilis: Ambassadors of Sound

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Featuring Spyros Koliavasilis, Hakan Keles, Nicholas Mitrone and Firat Alpergin

DC Café Aman invites you on a journey where time dissolves and borders become meaningless. DC Café Aman transmits the rich cross-cultural soundscape of Greece, Turkey, and the Mediterranean region, celebrating deeply intertwined musical heritages. The band draws its name from the legendary Café Amans—cafes that thrived in the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where multiethnic musicians expressed their joys and sorrows in Greek, Turkish, and many other languages. In these spaces, an extraordinary intermingling occurred, with musical traditions flowing together like far-flung tributaries feeding the same river. These intense musical conversations were later carried across the Aegean to create a musical genre known as rebetiko, essentially the blues of the Mediterranean, which still moves audiences today. The group’s repertoire runs the gamut from the raw rebetiko sounds of Greece’s Markos Vamvakaris to the melancholic folk poetry of Turkey’s beloved Asik Veysel to more modern compositions. It’s proof positive that music is a living thing—alive, persistent, and universal in its ability to travel, adapt, and survive. But if you’re looking for museum-piece preservation, you won’t find it here. This is living, breathing music that demands a response. Some songs are mournful enough to break your heart. Others are irresistibly catchy and joyous enough to pull you from your seat. But all of them remind us that culture is—and always has been—a conversation, not a recitation or monologue.

DC Café Aman was inspired and founded by the internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Dr. Spyros Koliavasilis. The 2025 Maryland Heritage Award recipient is a velvety-voiced master of the oud, cultural preservationist, and storyteller. With his oud in his hands, he weaves musical narratives, each string vibrating with the sound of fin de siècle bazaars and underground tavernas, but carried along with a brisk modernity. Abetted by his kemane (an Anatolian lyre called the Cappadocian Lyra) and the rhythmic pulse of his Greek Epirote defi (a small hand drum akin to a tambourine), Koliavasilis is a fountain of sound. Yet he’s no one-man band. Hakan Keleş’s passionate vocals and guitars add layers of complexity. Nicholas Mitrione’s timeless-sounding Greek bouzouki and baglama sparkle with spontaneity. And Firat Alpergin’s bass anchors it all with a contemporary pulse that keeps one foot firmly planted in tradition. Each instrument is beautiful to hear on its own. But the real magic is in how they speak to one another, across space and time. The ancient resonance of the oud converses with the bright, percussive snap of the bouzouki, while the kemane’s soaring melodies interweave with modish guitar techniques. When the defi joins the electric bass to anchor the rhythm, you hear centuries of musical evolution compressed into a single, transcendent moment. It’s this unique instrumental blend—part coffeehouse intimacy, part concert hall sophistication—and it makes DC Café Aman’s sound so distinctive.

DC Café Aman shows us that cultures have always been fluid, that music has always transcended boundaries, that sharing joy and loss through song is a universal human need, and that some of the most beautiful sounds ever created have emerged from the spaces where worlds meet and find common ground. DC Café Aman isn’t just reviving the past. They’re reminding us that we were never meant to be strangers. When you attend their performance, be ready to dance. Prepare to laugh and cry. And let DC Café Aman help you remember what music was always meant to do. Music unites.