Watersong (2025)

"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. 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." (The Guardian; 5 uit 5 sterren(!!))