Legendary Greek songbird back on tour.
Legendary Greek songbird brings birthday tour to Edmonton
Nana Mouskouri Happy Birthday Tour When: Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Where: Jubilee Auditorium Tickets: $59.40 -$89.40, limited seats, through Ticketmaster
Almost seven decades ago, an 11-year-old girl was about to get a pair of glasses.
The child was far-sighted and needed them, but she wasn’t very happy about it.
“It was a bad thing for me — I hated them,” says Nana Mouskouri, now almost 80 years old and recognized worldwide for a signature pair of black horn-rimmed spectacles.
“I stayed with these glasses because I thought they fitted better with my face than the others,” she said in advance of the Canadian leg of a worldwide tour to celebrate her 80th birthday on Oct. 13. She stayed with the spectacles even when Harry Belafonte insisted she take them off on Mouskouri’s first tour of North America in the early 1960s.
“They said ‘you should take off the glasses,’” said Mouskouri in a telephone interview from Paris. “It was strange (they said) to see a woman with glasses onstage.”
Mouskouri gave in briefly, but then she said “if you want me to stay, it’s with my glasses or I go.
“I wanted to be me the way I was. I thought the glasses would not bother anybody and, if I was sincere, they would accept me.” And so the world has. Now she is coming out of retirement for one more kick at the can. Will it be her last? Probably, but never say never with Nana Mouskouri. “I am supposed to be retired. It was really well decided and I do not regret it. For 50 years I have been on the road. It is not that I was too tired to travel, but there is a point where you don’t feel in the right place. When I was young, I did bring my singing and my music forward to the world.
“I said it was time for me to go and it (retirement) lasted six years.”
There were a couple of concerts in between but nothing as extensive as this global tour, which will see her come to Edmonton on Wednesday.
“For me, who worked all my life on the road, it was somehow tiring to be at home. I was not only jealous, I was regretting. Last year, I said it would be a very big anniversary in October. To celebrate I thought I had better be onstage to sing every song that has ever been important for me.”
Coming back was like putting on an old pair of trusted glasses. She started to work with some musicians and got into the swing very quickly.
There have been some bumps getting rolling. Last year, she started the tour with concerts in Brazil and Argentina, but in Buenos Aires, she developed a small cough and that turned into laryngitis that shut her down for several months.
Today, she says, her voice is as strong as ever. And she is looking forward to coming to Canada.
“It is a very important country for me. As a young singer in the early 1960s, I had a chance to work with Quincy Jones and Harry Belafonte and with Quincy Jones I started to record and I did a few records. It was the first time coming over here (North America).
“Harry Belafonte brought me to Canada. Since then I had a Canadian manager who was Sam Gesser of Montreal. He made me come over to Canada every 18 months to west and east and middle. It became one of the biggest markets for me.
“Sam made me learn about Canadian folk music, for example Gordon Lightfoot. He was working with Harold Leventhal who handled Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary. I did so many songs of Joni Mitchell.”
Mouskou risings in so many different languages she is a musical ambassador from all of Europe.
“I consider myself a European citizen because Greece is in Europe. I came in the end of the 1950s and early 1960s from Greece. I was quickly in Germany, France and England and then Canada and America. It was important for me, wherever I went to get really familiar with the culture and the music.”
This is why, she explained, she was so involved in a variety of musical styles. “As a young girl after the war it was normal. I was listening to jazz, Ella Fitzgerald. I did classical singing at conservatoire. Every country has a style, I just try to pull it all together.
“When I was young, I was singing all the time, but there was a time that I started to sing officially — professionally — that I was choosing the songs that I could learn something from, but were not against my feelings. So there were songs of love and peace of hope. You learn to sing Leonard Cohen, for example, because it is very important what he says.”
The current tour will feature one or two new songs, she says. “You can’t go on the road without some new things.”
But she does intend to include the most important and personally inspiring songs.
“Also, I have my daughter with me. She is a very good singer, but not only that, I remember when Judy Garland went onstage with Liza Minnelli. I’m proud to have a daughter who is a singer. She will do her songs and we will sing together. But mainly it’s me.”
Mouskouri’s daughter, Lenou, has poorer vision than her mother, but she wears contacts, Nana says. “She doesn’t want to look like me.”
Mouskouri, who was briefly a Conservative member of the European Parliament, doesn’t have much time for politicians.
“Politics frustrates me. Artists give hope. They see the people, they listen to the people and they know what the people need.”
As for the country of her birth, she is worried, but hopeful. The situation in Greece “is very bad but, like I say, we are all responsible for what happens in our lives.
“I’m definitely an incurable optimist. Nowadays the world cannot finish like this. There must be a change.”