Photo by Jim Provenzano
Diamanda Galás
Hailed as one of the most important
singers of our time, Diamanda Galás has earned international
acclaim for her highly original and politically charged performance
works, as well as her memorable rendition of jazz and blues. A resident
of New York City since 1989, she was born to Anatolian and Greek
parents, who always encouraged her gift for piano. From early on
she studied both classical and jazz, accompanying her father’s
gospel choir before joining his New Orleans-style band, and performing
as a piano soloist with the San Diego Symphony at 14.
In the 70s, Galás played
piano in the improvisational scene around San Diego and Los Angeles
with musicians such as Bobby Bradford, Mark Dresser, Roberto Miranda,
Butch Morris, and David Murray. She made her performance debut at
the Festival d’Avignon in 1979, where she sang the lead role
in Vinko Globokar’s opera, Un jour comme un autre,
based upon the Amnesty International documentation of the arrest
and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. While in France,
she also performed Iannis Xenakis’s work with l’Ensemble
Intercontemporain and Musique Vivante.
Galás first rose to international
prominence with her quadrophonic performances of Wild Women
with Steak Knives (1980) and the album The Litanies of
Satan (1982). Later she created the controversial Plague
Mass, a requiem for those dead and dying of AIDS, which she
performed at Saint John the Divine cathedral in New York City and
released as a double CD in 1991. In 1994, Led Zeppelin bassist John
Paul Jones and Diamanda Galás sought each other out for a
collaboration that resulted in the visionary rock album, The
Sporting Life.
Over the past two decades, Galás’s
wide range of musical and theatrical works have included The
Singer (1992), a compilation of blues and gospel standards;
Vena Cana (1993), exploring AIDS dementia and clinical
depression; Schrei 27 (1996), a radical solo piece for
voice and ring modulators about torture in isolation; Malediction
and Prayer (1998), a setting of jazz and blues as well as love
and death poems by Charles Baudelaire, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Salvadoran
guerrilla fighter and poet Miguel Huezo Mixco, occasionally fused
with the virtuosic singing of the Amanes (improvised lamentation
from Asia Minor); La Serpanta Canta (2004), a greatest-hits
collection from Hank Williams to Ornette Coleman; and Defixiones,
Will and Testament (2004), a 80-minute memorial tribute to
the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian victims of the Turkish genocides
from 1914-1923.
Galás has contributed her
voice and music to Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Dracula,
Oliver Stones’ Natural Born Killers, Spanish/Nicaraguan
filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez’s El Immortal (The
Immortal), as well as films by Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek
Jarman, Hideo Nakata, and many others. In 2005, Galas was awarded
Italy’s first Demetrio Stratos International Career Award.
Her much-anticipated CD, Guilty Guilty Guilty, a compilation
of tragic and homicidal love songs, will be released worldwide by
MUTE UK on March 31, 2008, and You’re My Thrill,
in 2009.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 2006
Photo by Olga K.
