Wandering tales

Languages real and imagined meet in the routes of migration, the meanderings of memory, sea-bed imagery. A journey in sound from the arid lands of expatriation to the watery depths of forgetting, change and metamorphosis. The artful merging of music and the spoken word, with the musicians’ instruments charting a parallel course: from fabulous peregrinations to the phantasmagoria of a world “as rich and strange as an undersea landscape”, the road becomes sound and words. And the music goes on, current and eternal… And the strangest thing of all: even in an era where everything goes (in which everything is connected stylistically or contiguous to everything else), you’re still not likely to find the contemporary double bass and the Renaissance viola da gamba, the modal ney of the East and the well-tempered piano of the West, the historic lyre of Constantinople and the electronic sounds of the 21st century playing together in the same band. But everything’s possible with musicians like these...
Savina Yannatou is one of very few artists who could bring so much difference together in a single group to creative effect. Her unusual curriculum vitae reflects the unusual combo she fronts: songs for children and adults, a repertoire ranging from the Mediaeval to the Baroque, the Mediterranean to the Balkans, from Sephardic to Smyrnaean traditions, and from free improvisation through free jazz to music that defies classification.

At her side: Lamia Bedioui (song), Haris Lambrakis (ney), Socrates Sinopoulos (Constantinopolitan lyre), Andreas Linos (viola da gamba), Michalis Siganidis (double bass), Manolis Manoussakis (live electronics, sound design), Maxim Mankofski (percussion), Yiannis Despotakis (vocals). The group is joined by the pianist, vocalist and jazz performer, Evgenia Karlafti, and Yannatou’s long-term collaborator, the poet and translator Giorgos Koropoulis. Savina takes care of the composition, orchestration, and the arrangement of existing material and vocal parts. In search, as ever, of a new poetic of music.