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.
Also out this month
Aidan Thorne and Jason Ball’s Archwilio’r Traddodiad: Exploring the Tradition (self-released) is a fantastic deep dive into lesser-known Welsh folk tunes on guitar and double bass. Recorded live, it mixes ideas from improvisation, jazz, ambient soundscapes and minimalism; voices and outside sounds occasionally interject, but somehow only deepen its resonance. Reg Meuross follows his song cycle about the toxic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Stolen from God, with Fire & Dust: A Woody Guthrie Story (Hatsongs Records). A warm, 16-track romp through 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 walk across Wales and Gloucestershire in 2023 by duo Seth Bye and Chris Roberts during which they performed 53 gigs in 58 days. Their interpretations are gentle, bright things, full of light, space and air.
