BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING BAND.

George Stathos, who describes himself as "the tallest Greek you'll ever meet in your life," is the elegant, lugubrious front man for My Greek Wedding Band, an outfit that, until recently, was known to connubially minded Mediterranean New Yorkers as George Stathos and Company. The band decided on the new name around the time that "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," the five-million-dollar movie that features the band's music, had grossed twenty million of the two hundred and fifteen million dollars that it has grossed so far. "The 'My' and the 'Greek' remind you of the movie title--and the 'Wedding,' of course," Stathos said over a glass of retsina at Uncle Nick's in Hell's Kitchen. "When I told some other Greek musicians about the new name, they said, 'That's a terrible name! Why're you gonna use that name?' And I said, 'Well, can you think of a better one?' And they said, 'No--but if you got any extra jobs throw them our way!' "

Stathos, who is six feet three, has dark-gray woolly hair, big ears, and ledgelike cheekbones. He plays the clarinet, which he calls "the folk instrument of Greece," and speaks better Greek than his second-generation parents. For the past fifteen years, the band--clarinet, accordion, guitar, bouzouki, darbuka (an hourglass-shaped hand drum), and female vocalist--has performed seventy to eighty gigs a year, including baptisms, folk festivals, back-yard parties, engagement parties, and weddings. Over the years, Stathos said, more and more clients were asking for modern Greek music played at "rock volume," or, worse, he said, "they were hiring d.j.s." Then one day about nine months ago, Stathos got a call from a musician named Emanuel Kiriakou, who said that he was looking for traditional Greek players to record pieces he had composed for the film. Kiriakou, Stathos, and his band performed some original songs for the "Greek Wedding" score, among them "Tsifteteli" ("Belly Dance"), "Tis Nyfis Ta Vimata" ("The Bride's Dance"), and "Kefi in Katavia." ("Kefi" means "good feeling," and Katavia is an imaginary place with a Greek-sounding name.) Stathos was paid four hundred dollars for each of the five songs that were used. ...