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The profile · researched 27 September 2026
The club shut in 1983. The orchestra named after it started in 2024.
Twelve Athens musicians named their band after Giorgos Barakos, the man who ran Greece's first jazz club from 1974 until the authorities closed it in 1983. Two years after forming, they have no record, one venue and a date on 27 September 2026.
The room under the Acropolis
Greek jazz has a founding address, and it is a small one. In October 1974 Giorgos Barakos opened a listening room on Ragkava Square, in the stepped lanes of Anafiotika where Plaka climbs towards the Acropolis. It was the first jazz club in the country. Barakos ran it until 23 November 1983, when the authorities shut it as part of a scheme to improve the district — a closure Athenian writers still treat as a loss the city never made good.
What happened inside was not only booking. The club ran improvisation classes, the first in Greece, and Barakos vetted people at the door himself, on the grounds that a room built for listening only works if the people in it have come to listen. Sam Rivers played there, as did Jemeel Moondoc and Peter Kowald. Greek groups including Sphinx and Iskra began their working lives on that stage, and players such as Lakis Diakogiannis and the guitarist Lakis Zois became fixtures. For nine years it functioned as both a refuge for people who already knew the music and a point of entry for those who did not. Barakos died on 23 November 2022.
The record that came out of the room
The club's other legacy is a document. On 15 April 1979 the pianist Sakis Papadimitriou and the saxophonist and clarinettist Floros Floridis recorded a live set at Barakos's, and the tapes became 'Αυτοσχεδιάζοντας στου Μπαράκου' — Improvising at Barakos's — issued as a double LP in the early 1980s. Greek writing on the period describes it as the first contemporary jazz album made in the country, and it is the reason a nine-year run in a small Plaka room is documented at all rather than merely remembered. The recording caught what the club was for: two players improvising in front of an audience close enough to hear the keys move, with no arrangement standing between them and the listener.
That inheritance sits awkwardly with a twelve-piece band, and the Barakos Orchestra does not pretend otherwise. It is not a repertory group and it does not play the 1979 material. What it takes from the club is the premise — that a room can be organised around listening — and applies it to writing for a full reed section.
Twelve people, spring 2024
The orchestra came together in the spring of 2024, when twelve friends and colleagues agreed to put a band together in Barakos's name. The instrumentation is unusual for a group that size. There are five saxophones and a clarinet — Leonidas Sarantopoulos on flute and tenor, Giannis Papanastasiou and Niki Kokkoli on altos, Gilad Atzmon on clarinet and tenor, Yiannis Kassetas on baritone — but no trumpets and no trombones, so the brass weight a conventional big band leans on simply is not there. In its place sit Jacques Marugg's vibraphone, Kostas Yiaxoglou's piano, Vyronas Dolas's electric guitar and Chrysostomos Boukalis's double bass, with two drummers, Nikos Sidirokastritis and Simos Riniotis, working at once. Giorgos Karyotis handles sound.
The twelfth voice pulls the group away from American models altogether: Harris Lambrakis plays the ney, the end-blown reed flute of Ottoman and Persian classical music. A ney inside a saxophone section is not decoration. It brings a different tuning sensibility and a different idea of how a line should be shaped, and its presence is the clearest signal that this band is not trying to sound like a New York big band staffed by Greeks.
What they say they are
The band's own description of itself, repeated in every Athens listing since its first appearances, is blunt about intent: a group born not to impress but to remind that music is above all an act of participation, memory and collective expression. The wording carries more weight than promotional copy usually does, because it is the only public statement of method the band has made. The programme is billed as original compositions by the members rather than standards, and the listings describe it as balancing contemporary big band writing, influences from different schools of jazz and the personal compositional identity of the individual writers, with modern jazz harmony set against collective improvisation.
Two years in, there is no album. No commercial release has been announced in any of the Greek coverage, and the group has no recorded catalogue to point at, which makes the live date the entire product. That is a real limitation for anyone outside Athens, and worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.
A venue, not a tour
Everything traceable about the orchestra's live history runs through one address: the Theatre of the NO, at 3 Konstantinou Palaiologou, opposite Athens City Hall. The venue bills itself as the first English-language theatre in Athens and programmes jazz heavily — a Wednesday jam session and a Saturday jazz series among them — which makes it a natural home for a band of this size at this ticket price. Tickets at the theatre typically run around €10 and a beer is €3, so the orchestra's €12 sits at the top of the house's normal range, and still at a fraction of what twelve musicians on a stage would cost anywhere else in the city.
The dated appearances are these. The orchestra played a late set there on Saturday 3 May 2025, starting at 22:30. It returned on 29 January 2026 at 21:30, at €12. It played again on Sunday 10 May 2026 at 20:30, same price, with the twelve-piece line-up unchanged. There is no evidence of dates outside Athens, no festival billing and no touring pattern; the group works as a resident ensemble that surfaces every few months at the same theatre.
Where they stand in September 2026
The current date is Sunday 27 September 2026 at 20:30, back at the Theatre of the NO, with tickets at €12 — €13 once the booking fee is added — through more.com and the venue direct. Athens listings have pitched it as a return rather than a debut, which matches the pattern: this is the fourth traceable appearance at the venue in seventeen months.
The players are not short of other work, which is part of why the orchestra moves at this pace. Lambrakis has led his own quartet since 2006, released Lafina in 2023, put out Unearthed with the trio Skraut on Underflow Records in 2024, has been part of Savina Yannatou's Primavera en Salonico since 1996, and has directed the Greek National Opera's Intercultural Orchestra since 2018. Riniotis is in Skraut alongside him. That overlap explains both the band's ease on stage and the gaps between its dates: twelve working musicians with full calendars can hold a twelve-piece together, but only a few nights a year.
The show, now
The current show is a single evening at the Theatre of the NO on Sunday 27 September 2026, starting at 20:30, tickets €12 or €13 with the booking fee, at Konstantinou Palaiologou 3 opposite Athens City Hall. The format is a straight concert with no support act billed: all twelve players on stage at once, performing original compositions written by members of the group rather than standards, in a programme the venue and the Athens listings describe as balancing contemporary big band writing, influences from different schools of jazz and the individual writers' own compositional identities, with modern jazz harmony opened up by collective improvisation. Running time is not published. The room is a small English-language theatre that programmes jazz through the week, including a Wednesday jam and a Saturday jazz series, so the setting is a seated listening space rather than a bar with a band in the corner, and at that capacity the ney, vibraphone and twin drum kits are audible as separate voices rather than as texture. Press coverage in Athens has so far consisted of previews and listings; no published review of a Barakos Orchestra performance could be traced, and the band has no released recordings against which to measure the live set.
Researched from athinorama.gr · ertnews.gr · culturenow.gr · stagenews.gr · stagenews.gr · athens24.gr · cityportal.gr · theatreoftheno.com