Savina Yannatou, Primavera en Salonico and Lamia Bedioui: Watersong
Considering water as balm and curse, life and storm: the fabulous Greek singer and collaborators transport us across centuries and countries
Savina Yannatou is a fabulous Greek singer whose work over the last five decades hasn’t stood still. Her CV includes interpretations of early music, throat singing, composing for video art and improvisations with Can’s Damo Suzuki. Her new album with Greek jazz ensemble and long-term collaborators Primavera en Salonica and Tunisian singer Lamia Bedioui is a global tour of traditional songs about water: how it can be balm and curse, source of life and storm.
Watersong begins beautifully, in Greece, with The Song of Klidonas. Singing of a mid-summer ritual in which girls place charms in a pot of clean water to be left outside bathed in starlight, Yannatou dusts the beautiful melody with melancholy. Then the mood shifts. Naanaa Algenina (Garden Mint)/Ivana mixes folk songs from Aswan in Egypt and North Macedonia into a wild, wayward concoction: Yannatou and Bedioui’s opening stunning harmonies twist into a middle section in which Yannatou gasps and ululates around stuttering instruments. Elsewhere, she gives Cypriot traditional song Ai Giorkis (St George) a sultry edge and Spanish ballad A los Baños del Amor (At the Baths of Love) a hymnal glow.
The album jumps across the centuries, from Ireland to Iraq, Corsica to Calabria, but it is filled with intensely modern moments. Michalis Siganidis’s double bass in Greek carol Kalanta of the Theophany has motorik-like propulsion. The 10th-century Arabic poem Mawal (To the Mourning Dove I Said) comes across as an avant garde contemporary prayer, setting a tangle of percussion against Yannatou and Bedioui’s spoken-word delivery, full of contrapuntal whispers and wails.
Traditional instruments such as Kostas Vomvolos’ qanun (an Arabic zither) and Harris Lambrakis’s ney (a Persian flute) also add drama and dreaminess. This album sets traditional music flowing and crashing in many unexpected, wonderful directions.
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