Savina Yannatou is a wonderful Greek singer whose work over the past 5 many years hasn’t stood nonetheless. Her CV contains interpretations of early music, throat singing, composing for video artwork 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 world tour of conventional songs about water: how it may be balm and curse, supply of life and storm.
Watersong begins fantastically, in Greece, with The Tune of Klidonas. Singing of a mid-summer ritual during which women place charms in a pot of fresh water to be left exterior bathed in starlight, Yannatou dusts the attractive melody with melancholy. Then the temper shifts. Naanaa Algenina (Backyard Mint)/Ivana mixes people songs from Aswan in Egypt and North Macedonia right into a wild, wayward concoction: Yannatou and Bedioui’s opening gorgeous harmonies twist right into a center part during which Yannatou gasps and ululates round stuttering devices. Elsewhere, she offers Cypriot conventional track Ai Giorkis (St George) a sultry edge and Spanish ballad A los Baños del Amor (On the Baths of Love) a hymnal glow.
The album jumps throughout the centuries, from Eire to Iraq, Corsica to Calabria, however it’s crammed with intensely fashionable moments. Michalis Siganidis’s double bass in Greek carol Kalanta of the Theophany has motorik-like propulsion. The Tenth-century Arabic poem Mawal (To the Mourning Dove I Mentioned) comes throughout as an avant garde up to date prayer, setting a tangle of percussion towards Yannatou and Bedioui’s spoken-word supply, filled with contrapuntal whispers and wails.
Conventional devices reminiscent of Kostas Vomvolos’ qanun (an Arabic zither) and Harris Lambrakis’s ney (a Persian flute) additionally add drama and dreaminess. This album units conventional music flowing and crashing in lots of surprising, fantastic instructions.
Additionally out this month
Aidan Thorne and Jason Ball’s Archwilio’r Traddodiad: Exploring the Custom (self-released) is a improbable deep dive into lesser-known Welsh people tunes on guitar and double bass. Recorded reside, it mixes concepts from improvisation, jazz, ambient soundscapes and minimalism; voices and out of doors sounds sometimes interject, however by some means solely deepen its resonance. Reg Meuross follows his track cycle in regards to the poisonous legacy of the transatlantic slave commerce, Stolen from God, with Hearth & Mud: A Woody Guthrie Story (Hatsongs Information). A heat, 16-track romp by way of the revolutionary musician’s life, it was commissioned by a Meuross mega fan, the Who’s Pete Townshend. Filkin’s Drift’s Glan (self-released) is the product of a staggering endeavour: an 870-mile stroll throughout Wales and Gloucestershire in 2023 by duo Seth Bye and Chris Roberts throughout which they carried out 53 gigs in 58 days. Their interpretations are light, vivid issues, full of sunshine, house and air.
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