Terra Nostra

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An uncharacteristic ethnic release from the jazz and new-music oriented ECM label, this is in fact a reissue of a 2001 live concert recording originally distributed only within Greece. Obviously, ECM thought they'd found something special here, and it's hard to argue with them, as this performance by Greek vocalist Yannatou and her excellent, largely traditional acoustic supporting band, Primavera Salonico, should be right at the top of any World Music enthusiast's "must have" list.

Some of Yannatou's biographies mention her classical training and her experience as an interpreter of Baroque and Renaissance music. She did have some classical voice training, and is (or was) loosely affiliated with an Early Music performance community many years ago. Certainly, she has strong, lovely voice, with great flexibility and range. But the "classical music" term is misleading, because she's really an interpreter of traditional folk and liturgical music, and both an ethnic music scholar and a passionate advocate for the music she sings. Some of her material may come occasionally come from the Renaissance or Baroque periods, but that doesn't put her into any sort of Early Music pigeonhole.

In fact, Yannatou's earliest recording, in 1995, was a collection of Sephardic Jewish songs, commissioned by a professor as an academic research project. Several years later, she recorded and released 'Mediterranea: Songs of the Mediterranean', a collection of songs from the Mediterranean Basin (including Albania, Armenia, Corsica, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Provence, Sardinia, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey), and a year after that, in 1999, she released 'Virgin Maries of the World', containing carols, hymns, folk songs and other liturgical material devoted to the Virgin, collected from around the world. Material from all three of these earlier recordings is presented on this live concert date, recording in front of an enthusiastic audience in Yannatou's home town of Athens.

For the Virgin Mary project, Yannatou worked closely with a musicologist, and in preparation for the earlier Mediterranean project she recruited a number of immigrants to help her with the pronunciation of the fourteen languages and dialects heard on the recording. This scrupulous attention to detail is one of Yannatou's strengths, and her understanding of the songs and their traditions is so thorough that she will decide to take certain vocal liberties with those that are part of an oral tradition, while changing other, more formal pieces very little, and in fact trying to preserve their original character.

She begins the traditional Sardinian "Ballo Sardo" with a deep, guttural croak that sounds like Tuvan throat singing, and ends with a type of improvised glottal scatting. On four other songs and a short recitation (all Lebanese material), she works with a second female singer, the Tunisian Lamia Bedioui, sometimes using a rapid vibrato and an eerie rhythmic babbling and high-register trilling as background to the main vocal. Yannatou has also thoroughly mastered the art of vocal dynamics, starting off a piece like "A Fairy's Love Song" with a small, delicate voice of almost aching purity, and then when the band boots it at the beginning of the second verse, becoming a vengeful fury who sounds capable of turning her mortal lover into stone - or worse.

In a recent interview, Yannatou identified Leonard Cohen and the Greek avant garde diva Diamada Galas as two of her favorite contemporary singers - Cohen for his warmth and emotional intelligence, and Galas for her fearless technique and power. Given such musical affinities, it's obvious that Yannatou is never going to approach any of her material as an academic exercise or a mere ethnic curiosity. She has a great voice and a great band, but her greatest gift is her ability to inhabit a song and make it her own. And considering that the twenty songs on this CD span a multitude of countries, languages, customs and centuries, Yannatou's accomplishment is even more brilliant than it would be otherwise.