Savina Yannatou and Mamak Khadem Improvise a Multicultural Treat

A blues musician from Chicago and one from the Delta would have no problem getting onstage and jamming on a riff. So why should it be a surprise when Greek singer Savina Yannatou and Persian-rooted Mamak Khadem teamed up the other day at a Los Angeles concert for an unaccompanied, totally unrehearsed, improvised vocal duet?

"I've improvised on record, so this shouldn't be very different," said Khadem before the show with a little nervous laugh."

"We felt each one of us know what she would do," said Yannatou after. "We thought it could not be a disaster."

Indeed. The duet was a rousing success, the sweet frosting on top of what was already a well-frosted cake of an evening. Khadem's opening hour showcased material from her fine 2007 album 'Jostojoo,' featuring music gleaned from studies she'd done in Greece, Turkey and Iran with lyrics derived from classical Persian poetry, played by a band that ranged into Armenian, Balkan and Kurdish traditional styles with a few modern touches, to boot.

Yannatou in her set took the audience on a Mediterranean grand tour, blithely announcing a Andalusian love song followed by a Palestinian wedding song in medley with an Armenian tune, an Albanian melody spliced with one from Galicia, a pairing of a Sephardic song with a Slavic language one from Northern Greece, and so on. And all that was given an unpredictable and always distinctive treatment with her remarkable vocal skills and the talents represented in her acoustic band Primavera en Salonico involving various degrees of traditional approaches, jazz influences and avant-garde experiments, often all at the same time. On the latter front, at points the band went into almost amorphous excursions, and Yannatou frequently pulled out an array of vocal effects that ranged from classical-pure to quasi-throat-singing growl to stunningly controlled utterances and ululations not far from those of bold vocalist-composer Meredith Monk or Yoko Ono. It's a style she's evolved over an impressive and wide-ranging career and arguably perfected with her new 'Songs of An Other' album.

Part of the ambitious World Festival of Sacred Music featuring 41 events in various Los Angeles-area locations over two weeks ending Sept. 28, this concert embodied the words from the Dalai Lama that dedicated the first edition of this series in 1999: "There is something in music which transcends and unites."

Yet in that light, this pairing of artists provided some interesting contrasts as well as common ground, approaches to language among them. In her cross-cultural pursuits, Khadem found language problematic, she said before the show. When after a time as a math graduate student and teacher in the '80s she returned her primary focus to the music she'd been training in since her childhood in Tehran, she proved eager and adept in a number of different contexts, fronting the eclectic Los Angeles-based Persian fusion group Axiom of Choice and being featured on a variety of film and television soundtracks ('The Peace Maker,' 'Battlestar Gallactica,' 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' among them). In the past few years, as she pursued Greek, Turkish, Armenian and other styles, she readily found the musical languages natural fits. The lyrics, though, were not as comfortable.

"I learned the songs in the native languages, but that didn't work," she explained. "I couldn't express the feelings. So I used old Persian poetry."

Yannatou, on the other hand, generally uses the languages of the source material, from her native Greek to Spanish-Jewish Ladino to Sardinian Italian. It appeared that at times she was using lyrics sheets (understandably) to help with that, but rarely did that interfere with her expressiveness -- though one could argue that she could take her eyes off the notes and do her best from memory as few in the audience would know the difference. One could also argue that the most effective communication is when she goes beyond words into the pure sounds of her expressions, even if it takes her on a path at times far away from the traditions she celebrates -- though one could argue further that the spirit remains true to those traditions, if not the sounds.

In any case, when Khadem and Yannatou sang together, it was fascinating to watch and listen as the two artists whose respective approaches are as different as they are similar found ways to establish their own ground and at the same time not trod on but complement the other's. Khadem started it off with a slow, somber line, with Yannatou then picking it up and taking it into new directions, more specifically Mediterranean than Persian. From there, they passed the melody back and forth with ease, one singing a line while the provided support harmony or counterpoint, both showing stunning combinations of control and instinct. It was short, but entrancing, ending with sparkling smiles and warm embraces between the two artists.

"Not difficult -- and also not for her," said Yannatou afterwards, with a gleam in her eye. "There is a way to do it."