Letting the Voice Go Where It Goes article @ All About Jazz

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Kostas Vomvolos on qanun and accordion, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Harris Lambrakis on nay, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Kyriakos Gouventas on violin, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Yannis Alexandris on oud, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Michalis Siganidis on double bass and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dine Doneff on percussion.

Yannatou shared her process and vision in creating Watersong and spoke more generally of collaborations, compositions, free improvisation, vocal techniques and arranging practices. An edited excerpt of the conversation is below.

Flyway

All About Jazz: So you have been with ECM for a quarter century now?

Savina Yannatou: Let me see—yes. But I started working in 1978. So I’ve worked for 47 years.

AAJ: And your voice is still as flexible and multi-colored as ever. Those of us who have been fans of the group Primavera en Salonico since the ’90s, your first album with that group, are so happy to have this new recording. At AAJ, the focus of late has been your work with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Barry Guy, so let’s begin with that. You both attended Guildhall [School of Music in London]. Did you meet him there?

SY: No, this is a coincidence that we both studied there, but no, I was there only for one year and in ’99, something like that, for a course. I met him when I was touring with Primavera in Salonico. It happened that we played in the same festival in Barcelona, La Mercè, I think. He and Maya Homburger [the Early Music violinist, his wife] listened to me and they asked me. It was a big surprise for me, because I was improvising with [bassist]

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Peter Kowald in the past and I never met Barry Guy personally, so I was very happy that I was asked to do this. And we have collaborated since, for some 15 years now.

AAJ: What prompted you to resuscitate, to revive Primavera in Salonico?

SY: We are together, this group, since 1993. We never stopped playing. We play, not very often now, but we play every year, somewhere, somehow. But it is a long time that we haven’t recorded a new CD. Since 2015. It is a lot of time, 10 years now. But during these years, we played.

AAJ: Glad to hear that, and that you’re still together. It’s such an incredible group.

SY: But everybody, each one of us can do his own works. It’s not a group that has to always play together. We don’t live, you know, together.

AAJ: You’re not married to each other.

SY: No, but we like each other very much. [laughs]

Full Fathom Five

AAJ: Your press notes state that “Full Fathom Five,” a song that appears in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was the seed for the album. Would you tell us a little about that?

SY: Yes. When I was younger, I was singing Medieval international songs, Early Music. So this is a very well-known song of this period by Robert Johnson [ca. 1583-1633, English composer and lutenist]. And I knew it because I was singing these kinds of songs. And I was very impressed with the lyrics, of course, the words: “Of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes..” All these transformations, magical transformations. It is death, but the body is transformed into something very magical and nice, something from the bottom of the sea. I liked it, I don’t know why. It is a very nice way to speak about death. It is macabre, but…

I liked the lyrics very much, so this was a starting place. And I asked a friend, a psychoanalyst, “What do you have in your mind when I say water?” I’m searching in myself to see why I am so attracted to this and he mentioned a book of Sándor Ferenczi [1873-1933]. Ferenczi was a psychoanalyst, Hungarian of Polish Jewish ancestry, who wrote a book about the sea. The book is called Thalassa. Thalassa means sea in Greek—and, for me, it was a very important element to continue about water. It’s difficult to explain, but he speaks about when the animals had to leap out of the water, because the water was less and less. So the first attempt at having sex was a battle for the moisture, it replaced the ocean, it was the longing for the sea life from which man emerged in primeval times. All this story about how the ocean somehow entered into the mother’s body and the embryo needed the water to exist, to grow in the belly.

So all this imagination of the water as the element of life, how important it is, how it is connected with birth and with our sexual life, all this was important to me to start to think about this project. Of course, with the songs that I used, this is not obvious at all. The different songs speak about water and love, water and marriage, water and death, water and tears, a lot of symbolic things about water.

AAJ: And you made the recording in 2022?

SY: Yes, and the first time we played it was in the Festival of Athens in 2020. We had the first experience of how we feel with these songs, how the concert is, and then, two years later, we recorded it for ECM. And of course we had in our minds all this about climate, the changes and the lack of water or more water than we need, all this…

Timbres and Textures

AAJ: How did you meet ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Lamia Bedioui?

SY: She’s from Tunisia, but she lives in Greece for many years. We collaborated first in 1997, for the Songs of the Mediterranean [Lyra, 1998]. This was our first album together. And then, for Terra Nostra [ECM, 2001]. I like her voice very much, and not only her voice. She brings a lot of songs, all these Arabic songs. And I like her voice because it is not a common Arabic voice. The way she sings, I don’t know if it is unique, but it is her own style, her own way to sing, and I like it very much. It’s very dry.

AAJ: You sound fantastic together.

SY: I think so. We are very different, but when we sing together, because we are different. I don’t know how you say it, we…

AAJ: Complement, I think. You complement one another.

SY: Yes, exactly.

AAJ: The counterpoint between “Allah Musau” and “Wade in the Water” is particularly wonderful.

SY: Yes! And in both of the songs, there is the word, the name Moses. There is a link, with the waters. And we did this also in the second song of the album. It is “Ivana,” which is a song from North Macedonia and one from Aswan again, “Naanaa Algenina.” We sing together and combine two very different songs. I like to do this very much.

AAJ: It’s striking. And tell us about that weird instrument, this waterphone that Dine Doneff was playing, with the strange harmonics.

SY: Yes, you can use water in this pot. It’s like a pot, a metallic pot with strings and Kostas, who plays this [Dine Doneff], he uses the bow. And sometimes it seems like an electronic instrument.

AAJ: Yes, strange. It’s a great sound.

SY: Yes. Very nice.

Tunes and Arrangements

AAJ: And, looking at these pieces, I see that you have a carol as well, a Christmas song, “Kalanta of the Theophany.”

SY: Ah, yes, it is Greek… It is near Christmas, yes. They enter into the sea to touch the cross. It is about this. And the words are, “St. John, Lord and Baptist, baptise me, a child of God.” Things like this.

AAJ: What was your process in finding all these songs? How long did it take you to put this program together?

SY: Some songs I knew already, the Renaissance songs, I knew, the Italian, the one from England by Shakespeare. Kostos Vomvolos, who does the arrangements, he searched also. Usually we do this with the musicians: Each one who wants to bring a song does so, and now it is not so difficult. Now, with the internet, it is really easy to search. In the past it was very difficult to find songs, it was a nightmare. Now, it is much much easier. And to find the lyrics, to find some pronunciations, correctly, to find things.

AAJ: Kostas Vomvolos brought in the arrangements?

SY: He starts. He does the basic arrangements and then, some of the songs, not all of the songs, we change them. He does some arrangements in a way that they can be changed. Because when we start rehearsing, someone may want something. We suggest, we propose. We start improvising, also, and the arrangements change every time for Kostas because, he knows this from the beginning, that it is a group and each one has to express. So we discuss and we decide all together. And now it very easy, because we know each other so well. And, somehow, with the improvisations we play as if we are one person. It is very interesting and very nice.

AAJ: And so, in jazz, we would think of these as partially head arrangements. You start with a basic premise, but also there are agreements made in rehearsal. But you have a road map, as we say.

SY: Yes.

AAJ: How many times have you performed this program for the album?

SY: Six or seven, I don’t remember now. Very little since the recording. Before recording, we played it more.

AAJ: Will you be touring with this program?

SY: We have played it in some places. We will go to Switzerland. And of course now we have a concert in Athens. And we will see what we will do in Greece. In Greece, sometimes we don’t program a long time before.

AAJ: Things arise spontaneously.

SY: Yes.

AAJ: That’s a lot of music to prepare quickly. So when you perform this, you are not doing a lot of reading, you have this mostly memorized?

SY: I look at the texts sometimes, but the musicians don’t like reading. They remember everything.

AAJ: That’s great.

SY: Yes, it is great. I don’t know how they can do it. They like to change it, of course. In every concert, they change a little. We have a baseline, but they like to change.

Letting the Voice Go Where It Goes

AAJ: You have so many different voices. Sometimes you sound like a sea gull.

SY: Ah. “Full Fathom Five.” It starts like this with the waterphone.

AAJ: And the overtone singing, did you study that?

SY: Well, I don’t do it very well you know.

AAJ: “Ballo Sardo” is the first time I heard you do that, on Terra Nostra.

SY: Ah, “Ballo Sardo.” Someone showed me, when I was 20 or 21, very young. And I remembered it. But of course I don’t know all this technique, I know a little. And this little? Yes, I use it. I can’t say that I know how to do it. I am not an expert.

AAJ: Your voice is so well-oiled. Some of the stuff you’re doing is so challenging. But I’m thinking that those techniques you use in improvisation and in changing your timbre, they must be really healthy for your voice. Do you feel like they keep it in shape?

SY: This is what I found recently. I really don’t know, because I don’t do a lot of exercises, I don’t study at home; if I need to, I will do it. But recently, I’m thinking that maybe the improvisation helps me. Although it seems very difficult and people say, “How do you do it, it is so difficult?” No, this is very easy for me because I let the voice go where it goes. I don’t push it. And, who knows, maybe this helps. Although my doctor, doctor for the voice, many years ago, he said, “Don’t do this to your cords, never never, you will destroy your voice.” And because I liked it very much, I didn’t listen to him and I was doing it.

The only thing I care is not to be tired. If I see, even for a little, that my throat has something that I don’t like, I stop. When I improvise, I don’t push it for one hour to do the most difficult thing and to have pain. I don’t do this. I do something that doesn’t hurt. And I hope, because you never know when it will stop, you know how it is, I hope to have it for more, for a long time.

AAJ: So do we. One technique that I have heard can give you trouble if you’re not careful is the overtone singing, because you have to divide your cords, they’re resonating on different frequencies. So that can cause some kind of strain if you’re not careful, but you do it very lightly, as you said, and you’re not doing it for hours.

SY: Yes. I do not do it for hours, and it does not happen always. I cannot control it. [laughs] Some people can do it from the morning to the night, but no, I can do it sometimes.

AAJ: On a recorded live performance of “Ballo Sardo,” you did the thing where you put your hand by your ear so you could hear the pitches clearly. You were clearly focusing on keeping it together.

SY: Yes, I also do it sometimes during the concert because it can be very loud and I have to listen to myself because I can be out of tune, you know.

AAJ: Yes, of course. But I didn’t see you do this for any other part of this, it was just for the overtone singing part, the multiphonics. But it was just two fundamental notes, you weren’t changing pitches at all. Like a drone, a rhythmic drone.

SY: Yes.

AAJ: Is that tune still in your repertoire?

SY: Yes, of course. “Ballo Sardo.” We like very much this song.

AAJ: For many years this has been a favorite on my radio broadcasts. When the politicians make me mad, I play it, a call to rein in tyranny. “Be careful, barons, to moderate your tyranny, otherwise, I swear to you that you will lose your power.” It is so strong, the lyric, your growling voice.

SY: Yes, this was very clear, I think. [laughs] It’s a Sardinian song, which had to do with the Italians, I think. The lyrics start with these phrases, “Wherever I go, I see walls. If the sky was in the earth, you would have fenced it, too.” And this had to do with the walls.

AAJ: Yes, we have some of that in Texas. There was one in Berlin, too, I understand, for a while. All those walls. Thanks for the history.

Moving Forward

AAJ: Anything else you would like to tell us about what you are doing these days?

SY: I have been with Barry Guy and played his piece, The Blue Shroud. He has composed this piece about Picasso’s Guernica. We were in Dublin some days ago and in a few days I will go to Thessaloniki, I hope I will be able to do it, where I will play with two members of Primavera in Salonico, Kostas Vomvolos and the bassist, Michalis Siganidis, in a small café. And in April, we have a concert here in Athens with the whole group, with Songs of The Mediterranean [Lyra, 1998], and also we will play some of the Watersong. And then, more and more. We go to Switzerland with the Primavera in Salonico. And I do different things, also. I participate in a theatre piece called the Taverna Miresia with a young Albanian Greek director [Mario Banushi], where I play as a performer, I improvise. And I play alone. I like it, too. It is a performance without words, only movement. For me, it is movement and vocal improvisation, free improvisation.

AAJ: So you are working hard.

SY: I like it! It is not hard.

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