Savina Yannatou
“Before I started singing traditional songs I liked to take elements from different traditons to free improvisation. It was like going to different countries and and taking something from [their] special vocal techniques… Improvising is a lot like thinking aloud.”
Becoming the characters of her songs, Savina Yannatou seems to have not one voice but many. Born in Athens in 1959, she studied song with G. Georilopoulou at the National Conservatory and Spiros Sakkas at the Workshop of Vocal Art in Athens, before going on to postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She has been singing professionally since 1979.
Collaboration with contemporary composer Manos Hadjidakis came early in her career, and there were explorations of Renaissance and Baroque music. In the early nineties she started experimenting with different vocal technics in free improvisation, encouraged by German bassist Peter Kowald.
“Before I started singing traditional songs I liked to take elements from different traditons to free improvisation. It was like going to different countries and and taking something from [their] special vocal techniques… Improvising is a lot like thinking aloud.”
Becoming the characters of her songs, Savina Yannatou seems to have not one voice but many. Born in Athens in 1959, she studied song with G. Georilopoulou at the National Conservatory and Spiros Sakkas at the Workshop of Vocal Art in Athens, before going on to postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She has been singing professionally since 1979.
Collaboration with contemporary composer Manos Hadjidakis came early in her career, and there were explorations of Renaissance and Baroque music. In the early nineties she started experimenting with different vocal technics in free improvisation, encouraged by German bassist Peter Kowald.
Since 1993 Yannatou has worked with the group of Thessaloniki-based musicians Primavera en Salonico. Their dazzling ECM debut was Terra Nostra, a live concert recording from 2001 which presented a whirlwind selection of music from Greece, Lebanon, Spain, Sardinia, Bulgaria, the Caribbean and beyond. Hi-Fi Choice called it “spellbinding” and the Los Angeles Times “magical”. Sumiglia, their first studio album for ECM was equally eclectic and exploratory, and was followed by Songs of An Other and Songs of Thessaloniki, a homage to the rich, sometimes painful cultural history of Yannatou’s band’s home town. Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast described the last of these as “brimming with riches”.
Savina Yannatou is also a sought-after composer, who has written music for the theatre (including Medea (1997), The Bacchai (2005), The Dybbuk (2006), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (2008)) and for video art and dance theatre.
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