Lizeta Kalimeri

Lizeta Kalimeri was born on 9 May 1969 in Thessaloniki, where she grew up with her elder sister, the singer Melina Kana. In a 2019 interview she recalled that the two sisters played music together at home and recorded cassette tapes for their relatives. She took up the guitar as a child, and after secondary school she studied in the Department of Pedagogy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. According to her published biographies, she first sang in front of a microphone in 1988, in Kastoria, in western Macedonia.

The Thessaloniki music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s shaped her beginnings. She has said that at the start of her career she sang alongside Sokratis Malamas, performing songs written by her sister. Her first album of her own, Πνοή του ανέμου (Breath of the Wind), appeared in 1994 on the Lyra label with music by Giorgos Kazantzis. A second, Ζωή λαθραία (Clandestine Life), followed in 1997 with the composer Michalis Chaniotis, a partnership she says she sought out herself. In the following years she worked with labels such as Lyra, Libra and Polytropon, and sang on albums by Loudovikos ton Anogeion, Nikos Kypourgos, Thanasis Papakonstantinou and others; she also appears on Haris Alexiou's 2002 live recording from Cine Keramikos. In the same 2019 interview she said that, after years spent partly in Athens, she had returned to Thessaloniki around 2011.

Kalimeri is above all an interpreter, but her albums also show her as a lyricist. Πνοή του ανέμου sets mostly lyrics by Lily Varinou to Kazantzis's music; the critic Kostas Balachoutis chose two of its songs, Φωτιά κι αρμύρα (Fire and Brine) and Ερωτικός χορός (Love Dance), among her most distinctive recordings. On Ζωή λαθραία all the music is by Chaniotis, while the lyrics come from several writers, including Thanasis Papakonstantinou, Pantelis Tsompanoglou and Kalimeri herself, who wrote the words of Δυόσμος και κανέλα (Mint and Cinnamon). In 1996 she shared Της Ασιάτιδος Μούσης Ερασταί (Lovers of the Asian Muse), an album of café-aman songs, with the singer Mario, and sang Kazantzis's Ήτανε αέρας (It Was the Wind) on an album by Michalis Papazisis.

On Αφύλαχτη σκοπιά (Unguarded Lookout, 2004), with music and production by Christos Tsiamoulis, she wrote the lyrics of four of the fourteen songs. With the composer Kristella Dimitriou she recorded settings of poetry: Σαπφώ, Καβάφης (Sappho, Cavafy, 2006) and Ηχώ (Echo, 2017), in which ancient Greek lyric poets are heard in Modern Greek translations by Sotiris Kakisis. Εν φλύα (In Phlya), released in November 2018 by Ogdoo Music Group, gathers songs by Orfeas Peridis, mostly with lyrics by Giorgos Sideris. Its title uses Φλύα, the ancient name of the area of today's Chalandri in Athens, where many of the songs were written.

Kalimeri belongs to the generation of singers who emerged in Thessaloniki in the late 1980s and early 1990s and carried the city's art-popular song to audiences across Greece; music writers still revisit her early albums. Her records also offer a precise exercise, because Greek credits name three different jobs. Open the credits of Ζωή λαθραία and answer for Δυόσμος και κανέλα: Ποιος έγραψε τη μουσική; (Who wrote the music?) Michalis Chaniotis. Ποιος έγραψε τους στίχους; (Who wrote the lyrics?) Lizeta Kalimeri. Ποια τραγουδά; (Who sings?) Kalimeri again. Then do the same for Το αμπέλι (The Vineyard) on Εν φλύα, where the answers are Peridis, Sideris and Kalimeri, and notice the short credit formula μουσική… στίχοι… ερμηνεία… (music… lyrics… performance…).

• According to her biographies, she first sang in front of a microphone in 1988 in Kastoria.
• She sang Σαλώμη (Salome), a song by Loudovikos ton Anogeion, as a duet with Sokratis Malamas.
• She wrote the lyrics of four songs on Αφύλαχτη σκοπιά (Unguarded Lookout).
• The title Εν φλύα refers to Phlya, the ancient name of the area of today's Chalandri in Athens.