Pulse of the Twin Cities, MN
Sept 22 2004

Diamanda Galás: Jazz?

by Holly Day

For some odd reason, the All Music Guide categorizes Diamanda Galás a
jazz performer. Maybe it’s because she plays the piano, usually
unaccompanied, and that’s something jazz performers do. If Diamanda
Galás is considered a jazz artist, then I hold great and high hopes
for the future of jazz. Jazz that includes Diamanda opens the door to
a potential horde of intense, wild-eyed performers that scream in
multiple octaves and utilize Tibetan throat singing and operatic
wails, sometimes all in the same song. Because this is what Diamanda
does in her
music, and whether you’re frightened or intrigued by her
performances, one thing’s for sure – you will never forget having been
in her presence.

Over the twenty-some years of her recording career, Diamanda’s
released fourteen imposing and mostly thematic albums. She’s written
entire albums about AIDS (Plague Mass, Masque of the Red Death),
imprisonment (Panoptikon), sexual oppression (Wild Women with Steak
Knives), dementia (Vena Cava), and torture (Schrei X). She also does
some awesome and frightening covers of blues standards, and has
collaborated with artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin’s John Paul
Jones and cornet player Bobby Bradford.

`Spend one week with a Greek family, and all the darkness and despair
and melodrama will find its way to the surface,’ says Diamanda of her
choice of subject matter. `It’s a culture that is kind of a dark
culture. It’s dark by the standards of what Americans consider to be
`normal’ culture. [The Greek people] are very concerned with things
like death, and very concerned with the politics of genocide, because
that’s how the culture was shaped. That’s the experience of the
culture. For the Greeks, life is a celebration, so the thing they’re
most afraid of is death. So that would be an obsession. The
discussion of death is a mirror of the brilliance and the gift of
life, you know, the beauty of life, and so that is why there’s so
much of that discussion. And also, the issue of mortality has to do
with the fact that this was a culture that was invaded so many times
by Italians, Germans, Turks. And so I think that has something to do
with the darkness in my work, because I’ve heard lots of stories
since I was a little girl of deportations, and genocide, of the
Greeks by the Turks, because my father is from Asia Minor.’

It’s those stories passed down to her by her father that form the
basis behind her newest release, Defixiones: Will and Testament (Mute
Records), which covers the mass exodus and genocide of the Greeks,
Assyrians, and Armenians by the Turks in the years between 1914 and
1923. The two-disc collection contains poems and journal entries from
survivors of the exodus, as well as many writings from those who
didn’t make it. Ali Ahmad Said’s `The Desert,’ a first-hand account
of being forced to march across the desert with hundreds of other
refugees, says, `My era tells me bluntly/You don’t not belong …You
die because you are the face of the future.’ Diamanda relays the
story in the original Armenian in a dizzying volley of operatic
screams that rise up in anger and throb low in hopelessness within
heartbeats of each other. `Orders from the Dead,’ one of only two
songs here that Diamanda wrote the words to herself, provocatively
summarizes collection with a scream of, `I am the man unburied/who
cannot sleep/in forty pieces!’

`The Defixiones refers to the verb `to fix,’ to fix, to mark,’ says
Diamanda. `It’s like a needle that goes into a doll. It’s marking a
territory as your own, and it says that, with the marking of that
territory, you have certain power. Whether this is the power to, say,
put a curse on a competitor, or an enemy, or to say, `If you
desecrate this grave, your daughter’s daughter’s daughter will perish
slowly from a horrible disease.’ That’s the nature of this type of
curse. It’s something that was and still is practiced throughout the
Middle East by people who have very little power, and this is their
response, these curses are their only resource available. For
example, if you had Greek, Assyrians, Armenians, living under the
power of the Turks, the Turks, because they could, could easily dig
up a grave to steal the jewels, or steal anything that’s buried in
the grave. So there would be curses on the graves to warn them, and
maybe, that would be all they had, were those curses. That would be
the only thing they had to protect them, and that may have been quite
a delusional kind of power, but nonetheless, it was the only power
that was had by these people. So that’s pretty much what this album
is. I am saying, you cannot desecrate this memory,’ she explains,
wrapping up the interview. `You cannot pretend this grave, and these
people, did not exist by digging it up. It exists, and when you dig
it up, the power of these people’s anger will outlast you, and it
will drag you down screaming.’
Diamanda Galás performs on Tue., Sept. 28, at the Fitzgerald Theater.
7:30 p.m. All Ages. $27 adv/ $29 door. 10 E. Exchange St.
651-989-5151.