Savina Yannatou’s fourth ECM album is a dazzling evocation of her band’s hometown, plunging deep into its rich and complex history. Once known colloquially as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thessaloniki has been home to a host of cultures, religions and ethnic communities. Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Slav-Macedonians and Pontiac Greeks have shared the city’s diverse life. Yannatou gives all of them a voice, even casting an Irish song about Salonika into this multi-lingual programme, in which she shines as a unique interpreter and spokeswoman for the city’s ghosts. As ever, Primavera en Salonico are a delight, one of the most resourceful bands of any idiom, as they negotiate the inspired – and very varied - arrangements of Kostas Vomvolos. Postcards of sound, snapshots from the past: such were Primavera’s starting points for this project. Savina Yannatou: “Old songs, as if with the label Souvenir de salonique, were our original materials. They became canvases for our imagination to create contemporary narratives on old myths. Sometimes the original ‘pictures’ are merely coated with colour, sometimes only the outlines are saved, and sometimes the addition of the new material transforms them completely. There is however an element which remains – by choice – almost unaltered throughout this process: the timbre of the instruments. This is what mostly forms the ‘texture’ of the material and conveys the final sense of the whole endeavor.” Behind the instrumental texture are the personalities of the players. This is a characterful group, whose core members have been collaborating as an ensemble for more than 20 years. Primavera en Salonico was formed in 1993 to play Vomvolos’s arrangements of Sephardic Jewish songs, with Savina as vocalist.