Savina Yannatou, Primavera en Salonico, Lamia Bedioui

Watersong is the fifth ECM album by the Greek singer Savina Yannatou and her long-standing ensemble Primavera en Salonico, joined again by the Tunisian singer Lamia Bedioui. Bedioui, who lives in Greece, embodies the desert realm, where Arabic and Bedouin dialect meet the languages of Mediterranean Europe. All fourteen songs deal with water, as blessing and as threat, as a source of life and as the force of the storm. They come from Greece, North Macedonia, Egypt, Spain, southern Italy, Scotland and Corsica, from the Arabic poetic tradition and from the African-American spiritual, sung in many languages.

The starting point was Ariel's song Full Fathom Five from William Shakespeare's The Tempest, which Yannatou interprets freely on the seventeenth-century melody by Robert Johnson. Kostas Vomvolos, on qanun and accordion, arranged most of the songs. Around him the ensemble adds oud, ney, violin, double bass and the percussion and waterphone of Dine Doneff. The album was recorded at Sierra Studios in Athens, starting in March 2022, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

In Full Fathom Five Doneff's bowed waterphone sets ghostly harmonics around the voice. Mawal sets a tenth-century poem by the Arab prince Abu Firas al-Hamdani to music by the Iraqi singer Nazem al-Ghazali, and Bedioui and Yannatou deliver it in spoken and sung lines over a tangle of percussion. The closing track joins the spiritual Wade in the Water to the Egyptian traditional Allah Musau, two songs of escape and spiritual liberation, with both singers in the lead.

Reviewing the album for The Guardian in 2025, Jude Rogers noted that Michalis Siganidis's double bass gives the Greek carol Kalanta of the Theophany a motorik drive, and concluded that the record "sets traditional music flowing and crashing in many unexpected, wonderful directions". At AllMusic, Thom Jurek called Yannatou "one of the world's great vocal improvisers". Her partnership with Bedioui goes back more than twenty years, to Terra Nostra. In Jazz Views, Nick Lea credited much of the album's success to the arrangements of Vomvolos and to the oud, ney and qanun.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2773, released on 11 April 2025, in a jewel case with a 16-page booklet inside a cardboard slipcase.