Savina Yannatou
Watersong

Savina Yannatou voice
Lamia Bedioui voice
Primavera en Salonico
Kostas Vomvolos qanun, accordion
Harris Lambrakis nay
Kyriakos Gouventas violin
Yannis Alexandris oud
Michalis Siganidis double bass
Dine Doneff percussion, waterphone
Recorded March 2022 at Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Yiorgos Kariotis
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 11, 2025

For her fifth ECM album, Greek singer Savina Yannatou returns with a collection of songs themed around water. Spanning the European continent and beyond, her sources draw from wells of uniquely situated cultures and traditions, where the elemental force that sustains us can be at once beatific and menacing. Along with her mainstay musicians, Primavera en Salonico, she is joined by Tunisian singer Lamia Bedioui, last heard alongside Yannatou on Terra Nostra, and whose Arabic inflections lend interlocking contrast to the Mediterranean flavors.

The soul of the set list is to be found in the Greek material, of which “The Song of Klidonas” brings that distinctive voice into frame, while violin and oud dot the sky with extra stars. Yannatou links these into a storyboard of constellations. Similar vibrations abound in “The Immortal Water,” which moves like a body in the throes of unrequited love, while “Kalanta of the Theophany” turns a solemn carol into a jazzy free-for-all. Yannatou and her band further skirt the edges of interpretation in “Perperouna,” which describes water as something prayed for to ensure a harvest for survival. A percussive backdrop lends uplift, violin and nay soaring as birds catching a tailwind.

While island hopping from Cyprus (“Ai Giorkis,” a hymn to Saint George) to Corsica (“O onda,” a paean to ocean waves and distant storms by G. P. Lanfranchi), we encounter a gallery of moods, times, and places, including “Sia maledetta l’acqua” (Cursed Be the Water), a playful 15th-century gem, plus two journeys farther north. In the Gaelic “An Ròn” (The Seal), the qanun plays the role of harp, filling the air with shades of green and blue. And in “Full Fathom Five,” Robert Johnson’s 17th-century setting of words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, percussionist Dine Doneff plays the waterphone for a haunting evocation of entropy. But nowhere is the beauty so deep as in “A los baños del amor” (At the Baths of Love). This anonymous ballad from 16th-century Spain configures water as a sign of loneliness, a space to drown one’s sorrows. It is also something of a sister to “Con qué la lavaré?” (With What Shall I Wash It?) by El Cançoner del Duc de Calabria (1526-1554), another astonishingly lyrical melody, held in the most delicate of frames. It expresses that same sense of solitude, but with a hint of resignation to fate. 

Bedioui’s contributions are worlds unto themselves, especially because of the bridges they build. “Naanaa Algenina” (Garden Mint), an Egyptian traditional from Aswan, finds a suitable partner in “Ivana” from North Macedonia. Where one opens in duet as a moonflower, the other turns mystical in its freer geographies. “Mawal” (To the Mourning Dove, I Said) sets the poetry of Aby Firas al-Hamdani (10th century) to music by Iraqi singer-songwriter Nazem al-Ghazali, meshing Bedioui’s spoken word with Yannatou’s improvisational underlayment, hand drums marking the unprimed canvas with their ink. Finally, “Alla Musau” (God of Moses), a Nubian song about baptizing infants in the Nile, is interwoven with the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water.” The result is unexpected and wondrous.

As always, Primavera en Salonico’s chameleonic abilities are as free as they are precise. Playing both an anticipatory and reflective role, the band unpacks as many vocal implications as possible without the aid of words. Of the same mind, they walk in unison, even as their speech draws lines between increasingly disparate tongues.