Savina Yannatou & Primavera en Salonico
Release Date: 09 March 2015
Label: ECM
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 602547091512
Genres: World Music Jazz
Description
Savina Yannatou's fourth ECM album is a dazzling evocation of her band's hometown, plunging deep into its rich and complex history.
Once known colloquially as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thessaloniki has been home to a host of cultures, religions and ethnic communities. Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Macedonians and Pontiac Greeks have shared the city's diverse life. Yannatou gives all of them a voice, even casting an Irish song about Salonika into this multi-lingual programme, in which she shines as a unique interpreter and spokeswoman for the city's ghosts. As ever, Primavera en Salonico are a delight, one of the most resourceful bands of any idiom, as they negotiate the inspired - and very varied - arrangements of Kostas Vomvolos.
Behind the instrumental texture are the personalities of the players. This is a characterful group, whose core members have been collaborating as an ensemble for more than 20 years. Primavera en Salonico was formed in 1993 to play Vomvolos's arrangements of Sephardic Jewish songs, with Savina as vocalist. But musical connections between several of the players stretch back still further, to the beginning of the 1980s. Between them they have played traditional music and thoroughly experimental music, and the range of experience opens new perspectives on this programme of songs.
Personnel: Savina Yannatou (voice), Kostas Vomvolos (qanun, accordion), Yannis Alexandris (oud, guitar), Kyriakos Gouventas (violin), Harris Lambrakis (nay), Michalis Siganidis (double bass), Kostas Theodorou (percussion)
Tracklisting
Norma Winstone & Kit Downes
Oded Tzur
Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz, Dave Holland & Bill Frisell
Fred Hersch
John Taylor, Norma Winstone & Kenny Wheeler
Keith Jarrett & Jan Garbarek
Jan Garbarek Quartet
John Surman
Azymuth
Shelly Manne
Brother Jack McDuff
Mark Dresser
Prefuse 73
Prefuse 73
Ross McHenry
Open Thread (Peggy Lee, Julien Wilson, Theo Carbo, Dylan van der Schyff)
