ADiamanda Galás performance is unlike any other performance you’ll ever see — even unlike other Diamanda Galás performances. Since the 1970s the singer has been stunning—and occasionally shocking—audiences with her uncanny vocalizations and theatrical stage presence. Getting her start in her hometown of San Diego, she boldly announced herself to the larger world with her 1982 debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which included the song “Wild Women with Steak-Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream).” In the 1980s and ‘90s she caused a stir with her The Masque of the Red Death trilogy of recordings and performances addressing the neglect of AIDS patients. Soon after, she received possibly her highest cultural visibility after recording an album with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. (On a more low-key mainstream note, she can also be heard as a voice actor in films such as Conan the Barbarian, The Serpent and The Rainbow and Dracula.) Among the most ambitious of her many recordings, she explored her Greek and Anatolian heritage on the 2003 double album Defixiones – Will And Testament, in which she was intent on “investigating the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923.” In addition to her own operatic compositions and interpretations of European art song, Galás has delivered hair raising renditions of American standards and songs from the folk and blues canon, which she does on the 2017 album All the Way. That album, released simultaneously with the live recording At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, were her first in almost a decade, following the death of her father and several years dedicated to caring for her ailing mother. Though her singing style can seem sui generis, she insists it is rooted in the Greek and Anatolian culture that was so important to her family. Her music is, perhaps, not to everyone’s taste, but like Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq’s 2015 Big Ears performance at the Bijou, those who attend Galás’ performance will likely be talking about it for years to come.
[Note: Diamanda Galás was scheduled to perform at the Bijou at the time of the interview. The venue has been changed to the Tennessee Theatre just two blocks away.]
I spoke with Diamanda Galás via phone, on International Women’s Day, and have edited and condensed our lengthy conversation below.
———————
About a decade ago you took some time off from performing and recording after your father died and your mother became ill. Did the time off change your approach or thoughts about performing, or was it difficult to return to singing?
Diamanda Galás: I didn’t really take time off. What I did was what a human being does when you see your mother alone and you hear she’s going to die in two years and you say to the doctor, “I’m not accepting that reality, what do I need to do to make sure it doesn’t happen?” This was nine years ago. So, it worked. My mother is now 91.
But there was no time off, I was working in a studio in San Diego to create a new work. I basically thought this is a chance to go back in the studio. It’s a work in progress and I’ve performed it a few times. It’s still being developed, it’s going to be an hour and twenty minutes and I was able to record parts of every section, which includes three poems by George Heym, who’s considered the first German Expressionist poet. It was so exciting to go in and work with this engineer who understood what I was trying to do. But that work would never had been done had I not been caring for my mother in San Diego at that time, and I did a lot of painting as well. And I performed but not as much as I’m able to do now.
But it’s a very difficult situation and a very important one when you have someone close to you and the only person left in your family and you want to be there for the person. Like now, I’m in New York, but I will go for a month and a half and come back then go for two months. My mother has a caregiver but she’s the most important person in the world to me, and anyone who knows my work should know that the person who sang “Let’s Not Chat About Despair” is not going to neglect her mother when she’s sick. In that song I was talking about all of us not neglecting AIDS patients when they’re sick, and so when it came time for my father and mother why would I act any differently. It’s just that we don’t discuss these things in society. We think of people who do this, who need the marketplace and don’t perform as neglecting their career, when in fact they’re not neglecting anything. They’re doing what’s most important. I’m a Greek and that’s part of our culture, not to neglect those who are sick. I’m very conscious of having both things on my plate. My work and my mother, and each take time away from the other, and it’s a problem, and I think many people go through this but it’s not discussed.
Speaking of Greek culture, in an interview you did with Rolling Stone last year you talked about beginning the song “O Death” with amanes, which is a style of singing that has to do with grieving, and you say has to do with the Greek’s biggest fear being the fear of a mother’s death…
Diamanda Galás: Greek’s have a fear of death of their mother or anyone who is close to them, it’s like the devil has come for them. Amanethes is pretty much the same thing, and the reason you can’t find anything about it if you look it up is because some idiotic heavy metal band from Scandinavia decided to make it the title of their record, so those of us interested in the scholarship of our own culture aren’t able to find the most scholarly articles written on this ancient tradition which was born in what is called Turkey but nobody in Greece would call it Turkey, it’s Anatolia. I was really angry, actually (laughs). I did an interview where I said I listened to their record and it was terrible and the band wrote me. But I live in Greece part of the year, I don’t give a fuck where you live, you don’t know the tradition! Those of us who are invested in the tradition aren’t interested in listening to your stupid record, just because you picked up the expression for God knows what reason. Please don’t do that. A lot of people do things like that, pick up an expression that’s sacred and call their record that expression because they think nobody’s ever heard of it and it makes them look cool. It’s like you’ve taken that culture in vain. It’s really irresponsible.
When I looked up amanes online I found this quote in an article from the University of Maryland at Baltimore: “The amanes became emblematic of a style of music that was both admired for its emotional intensity and rejected for its association with the oriental and feminine side of the modern Greek psyche.” And I thought that was interesting because just recently I read an interview with Aine O’Dwyer, who is also playing at Big Ears this year, where she talks about performing the Irish tradition of keening, and how it is a lament or mourning performed by women that is also being lost to that culture.
Diamanda Galás: Wow, that is really interesting. Because someone recently asked me, “Are you familiar with the Irish funeral tradition,” and I said “No I’m not” and I would love it if you sent a link to her work because I would love to hear it, really. And if any culture would know about it, it’s the Irish. They know, they know. They’ve had so much taken away from them and been exploited, the culture had to be radicalized because of how people were being treated, so I can understand how she feels with that part of the culture disappearing. It’s the same thing with our culture, the amanes are disappearing. The Turks take the music that was developed by the Greeks, the Armenians, the Assyrians and they call it Turkish music, but it’s not, it’s all of our music!
Your most recent albums contain two different versions of “O Death,” which is an Appalachian lament about the fear of death. I wonder when choosing songs to perform, do you you listen to multiple versions of it and research the history of the song?
Diamanda Galás: I did research that song, it’s a lonesome song, a cowboy song sung by someone standing on the ground alone at night singing to himself, or singing to who he feels are his deities. It’s kind of when I think about Hank Williams. I love him. I’m doing one of his songs at the concert I’ve never done before. I looked “O Death” up and it comes from either Scotland or somewhere else and it was originally a play that in America was adapted into song. It has a very complicated history.
Yeah, Lloyd Chandler, a ballad singer from North Carolina claimed to have written it, but I think there’s some debate about that.
Diamanda Galás: Maybe he did. Maybe. There have been debates about who has written so many songs. I’ve been studying Hank Williams career, and a lot of songs he says he wrote other people say they wrote. There’s a lot of that, and some of these songs are traditional and nobody knows who wrote them. So it’s hard to say, but by the time I’m finished with “O Death,” there’s a few lines of the original, and respectfully, very respectfully, I keep the melody, but I also add a lot. All serious improvisers do that. We’re not desecrating the songs, we’re not cutting it up into pieces, which all these stupid fucking assholes keep writing. “Oh yeah, she takes a song and she cuts it into ribbons,” and I’m like, “You moron!” I’m just singing a song, it’s like John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman or Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins or anyone who has been improvising all their life. it’s just what they do. Each time I do it, I take it to a different place. You have to go there, otherwise I’d be bored with it. And sometimes I do a song so much that I know exactly where it’s going to go, I’ll have formed a structure that is going to be repeated. Then I don’t do it for a while. I might do “O Death” a few more times than leave it alone for a while.
As an aside, since you’ve been reading about Hank Williams, I don’t know if you know this, but the theatre you’re going to be performing in in Knoxville, The Bijou, is a block away from the hotel where Hank Williams spent his last night, and some people think he actually died.
Diamanda Galás: (Gasps.) Oh you’re kidding me! Oh my God, what you’re telling me is extraordinary. Is this where he was supposed to be doing his last gig?
No, his last gig was supposed to be in Ohio, but he spent the night at the Andrew Johnson hotel in Knoxville. It was New Year’s Eve, and there was a snow storm. Some people think he didn’t make it out of the hotel alive, and other people think he died in the car on the way to Ohio. And I don’t how interested you are or how much you want to go into this, but you were talking about people claiming credit for songs, there was a man who lived in Knoxville who wrote hundreds of songs he sold to country artists including Hank Williams.
Diamanda Galás: You don’t mean Roy Acuff?
No his name was Arthur Q Smith. Not many people have heard of him, but Bear Family in Germany recently put out a collection of his songs, including his demos recorded on acetates.
Diamanda Galás: Wow, that’s pretty astonishing. I wish I could stay there longer and find out more about these things.
Sorry for the digression, but I thought you mind find all that interesting.
Diamanda Galás: No, no, don’t be sorry. These kind of things are what make life really fascinating.
I read an interview where you mentioned you started singing in part as a reaction to post-Ornette Coleman jazz, where the piano wasn’t as important in jazz groups. I’m curious if you experimented with piano and tried to make it more of a lead instrument, or played free jazz in groups before moving to vocals.
Diamanda Galás: Oh yeah I played piano in a lot of free jazz bands. And that’s when I decided I would either do the solo thing or do voice and sometimes use a bass player. And then I got into solo voice with electronics and I thought, “No, I don’t want anybody else in the room with me at all.”
I played piano with Bobby Bradford and David Murray and Butch Morris and other people, not so much in concert but in sessions. And then I said, “You know what, it’s time for the voice.” Because the piano I was playing, they always said I played like Bud Powell, and I didn’t think I played like Bud Powell. But if I did, maybe it’s because I was doing vocal lines, and playing melodic lines with both hands to make it stronger, instead of just comping with the left hand and playing with the right. There was already a bass player, so I didn’t need to do that.
When you did start singing, did you immediately have and know your voice, so to speak?
Diamanda Galás: When I started working on voice I was doing a lot of experimental stuff, and I would sing with my back to the audience and no lights and just going for it without knowing where it was going. And then I did some purely improvisational stuff with bass players, and I played with a soprano sax player, and in order to play with him I had to get really strong on the voice because soprano sax makes a loud sound and he had full power. So I started working really hard on the voice to be able to do duos with him because he was a powerhouse. Then Evan Parker showed up and we had a quartet and that was a real challenge. So I said, “Alright, we’re doing some serious vocal work now.” But I returned to solo voice because I had strong ideas about where I wanted to take it, then eventually I got into doing it with piano, and that was because a lot of people at the time wouldn’t pay me to do solo voice, they wanted piano as well. But of course I’ve played piano since I was five years old so that was not exactly a leap.
Ok that’s about all I have to ask, thank you so much for your time.
Diamanda Galás: Oh, of course. What was your name again?
Eric Dawson.
Diamanda Galás: Dawson? That’s… where are you from?
I grew up in East Tennessee.
Diamanda Galás: What city?
I grew up on a farm about 40 miles outside of Knoxville, near the Appalachian mountains. A lot of Scotch-Irish and English stock around here.
Diamanda Galás: Wow! Wow, I love that! See, I don’t know much about that. I don’t know much about that culture, but it’s really interesting to me. I’ll be doing my research about it.
Well I wish you could stay a few days and spend some time here, maybe go to Dollywood. Do you know about Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park?
Diamanda Galás: Oh my God, no! Oh my God! It always happens this way, I have a gig I have to do in New York and I have to go rushing back, and I really hate that. I did a gig in New Orleans and I wanted to stay longer see some things, but I especially feel this way when you’re talking about this Appalachian culture, it’s so interesting to me. But it will happen, though, it will happen.
Come back next year for Big Ears and stay a few extra days.
Diamanda Galás: Yeah, I will. I will.
Thanks for such an insightful interview. I hope to have a chance to see Diamanda someday. I didn’t imagine she has such influences and interests. You certainly don’t trot out the cliched drivel that many music journalist tend to do. I will have to seek out some of your work.