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Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955 in San Diego, California, U.S.) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and soprano. She has campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of the infected. Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California, to a Maniot Greek-American mother from Dover, New Hampshire, Georgianna Koutrelakos-Galás, and an Egyptian-American father from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Galás, both of whom belonged to the Greek Orthodox culture but considered themselves agnostic. In the early 1970s, Galás and her friend contra-bass player Mark Dresser joined the jazz band Black Music Infinity, which included drummer Stanley Crouch, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, cornetist Butch Morris, flutist James Newton, and saxophonist David Murray. She later collaborated with members of the San Diego band CETA VI, which included, among others, jazz saxophonist Jim French, with whom Galás went on to record and release her first compositions, as part of the album If Looks Could Kill (1979), together with guitarist and sound engineer Henry Kaiser. At the same time, Galás was preparing for her live solo debut, which took place at the 1979 Festival d'Avignon, in France, where she was doing post-graduate studies. It was a performance of Vinko Globokar's Un Jour Comme un Autre (A Day Like Any Other), an opera based on Amnesty International's documentation about the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Her first solo album, The Litanies of Satan (1982), was also an operatic work. It included only two compositions: a twelve-minute piece entitled 'Wild Women with Steak-Knives', which was described by Galás in the album notes as tragedy-grotesque deriving from her work "Eyes Without Blood", and another lengthy composition, 'Litanies of Satan', an adaptation to music of a section from Charles Baudelare's poem Les Fleurs du Mal.