Babis Tsertos, Greek singer-songwriter and bouzouki player

Haralambos (Babis) Tsertos is a Greek musician. His sister is the singer Nadia Karagianni and his father was also a musician who played the mandolin. At the age of 17, he settled permanently in Athens and in 1974, he entered the Faculty of Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

The bouzouki is a musical instrument popular in West Asia, Balkans, and Turkey. It is a member of the long-necked lute family, with a round body with a flat and a long neck with a fretted fingerboard. It has steel strings and is played with a plectrum producing a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. It is the precursor to the Irish bouzouki, an instrument derived from the Greek bouzouki that is popular in Celtic, English, and North American folk music. There are 2 main types of Greek bouzouki: the trichordo (three-course) has three pairs of strings and the tetrachordo (four-course) with four pairs of strings. The instrument was brought to Greece in the early 1900s by Greek refugees from Anatolia, and quickly became the central instrument to the rebetiko genre and its music branches. It is now an important element of modern Laïko pop Greek music.