Savina Yannatou & Primavera en Salonico

by John Payne

Dark-toned but ambrosial, highly disciplined yet seemingly bursting with a soul of pure flame, the rather staggering Athens-born singer Savina Yannatou is a virtuosic chameleon adept at an extensive range of vocal traditions (and languages) from the Mediterranean region – not just interpreting but leaping off from these old folk musics with a daring, exploratory technique and far-flung tonal scope that allows her to stamp it all with a brash intelligence and some might say punky attitude. There’s not a thing dried-up or academic about her new takes on ancient songs… Yannatou really lets the blood out of these songs, brazenly improvising on them, as if called by some inner primal force, kneeding and kneedling them, caressing them, smearing their borders and launching out something entirely new in the process. - L.A. Weekly

By Don Heckman
Special to The Times

Savina Yannatou unassumingly strolled on stage Sunday at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall, her slender figure garbed in a flowing red chiffon tunic. Her most notable attribute: an apparent reluctance to perform, almost shyness.

She announced each song in a soft, gentle voice, sometimes simply providing a title and the number's country of origin. Occasionally, she recited an English translation of a song's lyrics.

For the first few numbers, the Greek singer's low-key demeanor dominated the music as well. Overt charisma - despite a growing résumé of rave reviews - was clearly not her game. Singing with precision and control, reading her songs from a notebook on a music stand as she clutched the microphone, she made no apparent effort to invest her performance with anything other than a calculated focus on her songs.

This, despite the fact that the music she has explored through some 20 albums, most of it from Mediterranean countries, simmers with the passion of centuries of traditional songs.

Backstage before the performance, part of only her second U.S. tour, Yannatou displayed similar reserve. Almost dwarfed by a large armchair, the small, fine-boned Greek artist smiled when asked about the reaction to "Sumiglia," her boundary-less new release from ECM Records.

"When I first started singing Sephardic songs and Mediterranean songs," she said, "I really didn't think they could ever be released in an album. Now I have done a few CDs, and they have all had very good reviews. So, like all musicians and artists, I hope that we will make many more."

Back on stage, Yannatou's reserve slowly transformed, especially as she moved into rhythmic music from Bulgaria, emotionally intense tunes from Italy, Spain and Corsica and a gripping Palestinian song. Although her physical manner and between-song comments remained composed, her vocal style expanded dramatically.

Her initial emphasis on cool-toned interpretations, enhanced by a sumptuous sound and a subtle vibrato, gradually transformed into a startlingly diverse repertoire of vocal techniques. In some numbers she employed "throat singing" - a technique in which deep throat tones are used to generate whistling overtones. For others, she flexed her sound to the point where she could produce a melodic line in octaves.

In the concert's last few pieces, she produced bird calls, yelps, squeals and growls with an intensity reminiscent of the late avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian, as she led her four-piece ensemble through electrifyingly contemporary sounding segments.

"I have always been fascinated with the different colors of the voice, the different ways of singing," said Yannatou, opening up conversationally, similar to how she opened up musically on stage. "And that, I think, is what attracted me to the different [styles of] music of the Mediterranean. Singing them becomes like a game, playing with the sounds and the words of different languages."

Yannatou still lives in Athens, where she was born. Although she devoted a few years to guitar lessons, her primary instrument has always been her voice.

"My sister," she said, "helped me get into a choir when I was very young - 7 years old.... And she helped me to learn the second voice, taught me not to be confused by what the other singers were doing. And it turned out to be a very important experience for me - to learn music, to learn how to be with other persons, to share the experience."

She studied voice at the National Conservatory and the Workshop of Vocal Art in Athens, continuing with postgraduate study at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her professional career began - while she was still a student - with vocal contributions to the popular "Lillipoupoli" children's program on Greek National Radio 3 under the direction of composer Manos Hadjidakis.

Yannatou initially concentrated on contemporary Greek song and opera. Renaissance and Baroque music attracted her interest next, followed in the early '90s by a fascination with vocal techniques and free improvisation.

By the mid-'90s she had met and formed a creative alliance with the members of Primavera en Salonico, the group that has backed her for more than a decade and with whom she has recorded several albums with combined U.S. sales of about 10,000.

"I first met them," she said, "when I became interested in Sephardic songs from Saloniki.... We started doing concerts and eventually, the songs of the Mediterranean came next."

"And now, suddenly," she adds with a smile, "it has been more than 10 years together."

Yannatou finished the Schoenberg Hall concert with more wide-open improvisations, her vocal excursions enhanced by the heroic accordion playing of the group's music director, Kostas Vomvolos; the multilayered percussion work of Kostas Theodorou, the string bass of Michalis Siganidis and the nay flute of Haris Lambrakis.

By this point it was fully apparent that Yannatou's quiet stage demeanor, like her calm, intimate conversational manner, represented only one facet of a complex personality. Rather than rely on superficial stagecraft, she employs her voice, her eyes and her inner intensity to mine a creative trove filled with emotional treasures.

"If you choose to do this kind of work," concluded Yannatou, "you have to have a basic love of music. And for me it is always the expression of the music, the feeling within the music, that has to come first. So, I can only hope that what I do, what I sing, is experienced as passionate, even if I don'tnecessarily seem that way when I am on stage."

March 8, 2005 - LOS ANGELES TIMES

by Nick Bromell

…her voice has incredible intricacies of expression, myriad details of delivery that would sound rococo if they weren’t grounded on the very simple structures of the songs she sings. There is something birdlike in her quickness and precision and also in the overflowing generosity of her sound. … Part Bessie Smith, part Edith Piaf, part ornette Coleman, and part Janis Joplin, she is anything but “quiet”. And yet, I think what she means about the quietness in her music. Like Billie Holiday (of whom Savina remarks, “I think she is the best of us all”), she is a listening singer. … Yannatou carries us on a voyage into different musical dialects with varied textures and inscapes. In each song we hear her voice carefully feeling its way into a new idiom… Yannatou does not simply appropriate these different worlds into her own or wander through them like an aimless tourist. …”I try to stand in the atmosphere of those different voices”. Then she thinks for a moment and smiles, “A language of languages – this is what I am trying to create.” …Listening to Yannatou, we hear her listening into the silence for the vanished voice of that Other. And in her recognition of the Other’s presence in every moment or detail of each song, we can too hear that silent voice singing just behind hers. We hear the voice she is listening for even as we listen to hers. We learn to listen.

May/June 2003, - Tikkun, USA

By Berthold Klostermann

…The Greek singer Savina Yannatou is no folk interpreter in the narrow sense of the word. She has mastered the art of interpretation, full of expression she endows the forms with life, slips into roles and changes these with as little effort as she does switch the languages and vocal techniques she has made her own. Above all: she experiments. Beginning from traditional vocal styles, she explores the field of free improvisation. Her ensemble Primavera en Salonico is recruited from jazz experienced instrumentalists and improvisation experienced folk musicians, and thus do interpretation and improvisation, tradition and experiment come equally into their right with Yannatou as they seldom do. Even if not in one and the same song.

Moreover does the program divide into two groups: here songs arranged with care by accordionist Kostas Vomvolos, interpreted comparatively “traditionally”, there collective improvisations on the basis of Greek folk songs. The first are enchanting, the latter are the sensation. A kind of “free style world music” with clear African sounds.

November 2008
- FONO FORUM / Germany

Savina Yannatou & Primavera en Salonico | ECM Records (2008)
By John Kelman

Greek singer Savina Yannatou and her longstanding group, Primavera en Salonico, continue to mine music from a wealth of seemingly disparate cultures, proving that politics and religion may divide, but music unites. Avoiding the liner notes, what's perhaps most surprising about Songs of An Other is how the songs may feel as if they're aligned with one culture when, in fact, they come from another. It's all part of the boundary-breaking aesthetic that has defined Yannatou's group since they first came together in the mid-'90s.
With identical personnel and a similarly eclectic instrumental blend as on Sumiglia (ECM, 2005), four years of extensive touring has resulted in an avant world music where the interaction is at a far deeper level than ever before. It's also created the kind of implicit trust required to make Songs of An Other a far more improvisational affair—the most profoundly outré disc, in fact, of Yannatou's career.
It's also the first time—at least since the its 2004 ECM debut Terra Nostra—that Primavera en Salonico has augmented music sourced from Mediterranean and Eastern European countries with original material, showcasing the septet's increasingly open-minded and open-ended approach. Yannatou's oblique melody on the dragon-slaying song “O Yannis kai O Drakos” acts as the abstract tone poem's focal point, where primary arranger Kostas Vomvolos' accordion creates an abstract wash of sound over which the group's regular bassist, Michalis Siganidis, trades ideas with percussionist Kostas Theodorou, heard here on a second double-bass. Yannatou possesses a rare capacity for warm nuance and extreme extended techniques; a breadth of expressiveness that positions her alongside Norwegian vocal innovators Maja Ratkje and Sidsel Endresen, albeit in a completely different context.
“Perperouna,” possesses a more foreboding but clearly defined melody, sung with increasing fervor over a Burundi rhythm, but ultimately heads into territory far freer than anything previously heard from the group. The basis of Songs of An Other may indeed, be songs, but despite form defining material ranging from the propulsive yet lyrical Greek closer, “Ah, Marouili” to the dervish-like—and surprisingly Celtic—”Za lioubih malmo tri momi” from Bulgarian Macedonia, Yannatou and the group take greater liberties, whether it's her near-percussive vocal improvisations or the free-improv proclivities of Yannatou, violinist Kyriakos Gouventas and Vomvolos during the even fierier “Radile.”
As intense as some of Songs of An Other can be, there are moments of haunting, ethereal beauty. Armenia's “Sassuni Oror” is near ambient in nature, whereas the Serbian “Smilj Smiljana” possesses a quiet majesty; melancholy, yet strangely optimistic.
The same way that ECM has inspired a traditional folk musician like Robin Williamson to explore the juncture of poetry, simple melody and exploration on The Iron Stone (ECM, 2007), so too has the label encouraged Yannatou to expand her horizons, even while remaining true to the essentials that define her music. With the joyously unpredictable Songs of An Other, Yannatou and Primavera Salonico enter uncharted territory, leaving where they'll go next is anybody's guess. - All About Jazz