Penny Baltatzi

Penny Baltatzi (also written Mpaltatzi) has said that she has sung since early childhood and that her parents answered this talent with piano lessons and a choir. She studied early-childhood care and also music technology, but music became her profession. At sixteen she was already singing in pubs and piano bars in Vyronas, a district of Athens, and at seventeen she had an early-evening slot in a piano bar. For years she worked wherever there was a stage: piano restaurants, clubs with a laïko programme where she sang mostly old popular songs, and even village festivals. In 2007 an advertisement in the Athens newspaper Athens Voice led her to the singer-songwriter Fivos Delivorias and to a wider audience.

Her band Penny & The Swingin' Cats took its name from its first drummer, who used to call everyone “cats”. The group began with cover versions, but Baltatzi soon wrote her own material, and the EP Retro appeared in November 2013. That year she and guitarist Giorgos Zervos also formed Penny & The Great Big Band, a twenty-piece orchestra that played in the atrium of the Athens Concert Hall at TEDxAcademy in September. In 2017 she presented new solo songs in the show Και όμως υπάρχει χαρά (And Yet There Is Joy) at Passport Kerameikos. Television widened her public: in the 2020–21 season she appeared with actor Antonis Loudaros on Just the 2 of Us, and in 2021 she was a vocal coach on House of Fame.

Baltatzi's early recordings look back to the swing and dance music of earlier decades while keeping a present-day energy. A music-site biography credits all six songs on Retro to her as lyricist and composer. In an interview she described Γυφτάκι (Little Gypsy) as a social song, a search for the free human being, and the title track as her love for Greece's Belle Époque. The 2015 album Εξωτικό χαρμάνι (Exotic Blend) gathers fourteen tracks with Greek and English titles. Its title song was named song of the quarter for April–June 2014 in Cosmote's Jumping Fish competition and won a week-long public vote on the online music channel BalconyTV, against bands from forty countries. One interviewer said he would have bet the song was by the bouzouki master Manolis Chiotis; she replied that his influence on her was enormous.

As early as 2014 she said that she goes where music takes her, not fashion, and that her new songs were moving beyond swing. Ένα φιλί (A Kiss), released in 2019, is a nine-track album closer to Greek pop. Later singles such as Χρώματα (Colours) in 2023 and Ήταν (It Was) in 2024 continued this direction. She has also said that she is above all a singer, and that writing lyrics came to her almost out of necessity.

In the 2010s swing and retro sounds became fashionable in Athens clubs, and Baltatzi, who had started before the trend, was one of its prominent voices. She now reaches a wide public through concerts, such as her 2021 evening in the garden of the Athens Concert Hall, and through television. For a learner, her songs are a good way to talk about sound. Listen to the opening of Εξωτικό χαρμάνι (Exotic Blend) and name the instruments you can hear; her band's line-up included η τρομπέτα (trumpet), το κοντραμπάσο (double bass), η κιθάρα (guitar) and τα τύμπανα (drums). Then describe the style in a sentence of your own, for example: Ακούγεται σαν τραγούδι άλλης εποχής, αλλά θυμίζει και κάτι σημερινό (It sounds like a song from another era, but it also recalls something modern). Compare it with a song from Ένα φιλί (A Kiss).

• The band's name came from its first drummer, who called all the musicians “cats”.
• Her largest line-up, Penny & The Great Big Band, had twenty musicians, including nine wind players and a string quartet.
• Before music became her job, she studied early-childhood care.
• She has said that she writes songs in English as well as in Greek.