Songs of Thessaloniki is the fourth ECM album by the Greek singer Savina Yannatou and her ensemble Primavera en Salonico, a portrait of the port city the band calls home. Once known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thessaloniki was shared by Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Slav-Macedonians and Pontic Greeks. Yannatou gives each community a voice in a multilingual programme of seventeen songs and hymns, which even finds room for an Irish song about Salonika from the First World War.
Primavera en Salonico was formed in 1993 to perform Sephardic songs arranged by Kostas Vomvolos, who plays qanun and accordion and wrote the arrangements here too. The ensemble also includes Yannis Alexandris on oud and guitar, Kyriakos Gouventas on violin and Harris Lambrakis on nay, with double bass and percussion. Several of the players come from traditional music, others from experimental fields. The album was recorded in February 2014 at Sierra Studios in Athens and produced by Manfred Eicher. The booklet carries historical photographs of the city with notes by the singer's sister.
The songs are starting points rather than fixed texts, some reworked heavily and others kept close to their sources. The programme opens and closes with Apolitikion Agiou Dimitriou, a Greek hymn to the city's patron saint, Demetrius, played the second time as an instrumental. La cantiga del fuego is a Sephardic song about the fire of 1917 that destroyed the centre of the city. Iptidadan yol sorarsan, a Turkish Bektashi hymn on words by Şah İsmail Hatayi, is carried by voice, nay and percussion.
Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast praised "the perfectly natural, unaffected singing voice of the best folk singers" and the range of atmospheres the band has at its disposal. Reviewing for Songlines in 2015, Marc Dubin found Yannatou "still seems most at home with the Sephardic material", and noted that the vibrato of her earlier records is held in check here. He also pointed to the three songs of the city's pre-1913 Slavophone community, a sensitive subject in Greece.
This is the CD edition of ECM 2398, released in March 2015, with a booklet of photographs and liner notes.
