ANNA-KAISA LIEDES
Kuuttaren Korut
Olarin Musiikki OMCD 44 (1993)

ARTO JÄRVELÄ
Polska Differente
OArt Mouzak OArt CD1 (1994)

At first, the Finnish tradition-rooted upsurge of the last few years was led largely by bands. As it evolves, musicians are emerging from those bands with solo projects, and here are two - very different, but equally distinctive.
      Singer and kantele player Anna-Kaisa Liedes was a member of Niekku, whose music seems to be more widely appreciated now than it was when the band existed. For recent discoverers of Niekku, there's much to find in Kuuttaren Korut, which among others strongly features another ex-member, Maria Kalaniemi, and shows Liedes exploring the sounds her voice can make in response to subject matter, drawing on stylistic and textural ideas as well as material from the folk tradition, beginning with a Finnish gipsy song of love, death and the hoped-for afterlife across the river of Tuonela.
      Fellow-members of the newly-formed brand-leading group in Finnish vocal development, Me Naiset, which has yet to release an album but will devastate when it does, join her on Viinarattihin Rakastuin, an Ingrian runo-song in the Kalevala metre (bemoaning the lot of the poor woman whose significant other is a drunk), in which the leader-chorus format develops into a counterpoint rhythmic pattern as the voices break into leaps across the falsetto divide. The title track, another runo song in the same metre but with a strange and presumably allegorical or magical theme, gets a very different treatment - a serenely pensive vocal over hypnotic rippling kanteles. The ballad Seida ja Rikhard, of a forsaken maiden's suicide in the sea that should have brought her lover to her, uses three contrasting sections, culminating in a wild, tortured expressiveness, which gives way on the final track to a calm, wordless lullaby.

      One of the most inspiring aspects of the situation in Finland is that musicians aren't presenting albums as trade-cards intended to show how technically smart they are, but are genuinely pursuing what interests them. Arto Järvelä has played fiddle, mandolin or nyckelharpa with just about everyone, but like Anna-Kaisa's his album is very much an expression of his own musical personality. It begins straightforwardly enough with a polska inflenced by the Finnish-American fiddler Frank Hietala, but in the c-part a walking-bass kicks in and the tune changes gear with a strong influence from Järvelä's Texan/Floridan-Finnish counterpart Erik Hokkanen.
      Six of the twelve items here, including the two songs, are Järvelä compositions, (the lovely Unien valssi in collaboration with the American Café Orchestra's guitarist Morten Alfred Høirup), and show him joining the hall of fame of Finland's composing fiddlers with the likes of Ostrobothnia's late Otto Hotakainen, a player with an unusual on-the-knee style whose tunes were often strongly reminiscent of Texas/Mexican border musics; his Ravit Käpylässä gets a bluegrass treatment featuring the banjo of Janne Viksten, who engineered both this and Anna-Kaisa's album. The number of guest musicians, 21, reflects Arto's musical sociability, but, with the exception of the final track, Wäinön haikara (with backing vocals and more, based on a bass riff, which is in sound uncharacteristic of the album but in spirit not uncharacteristic of Arto), only a few play at a time, and the result is the sort of melodic and textural variety, and dryish wit, not always met with on fiddle albums.


© 1994 Andrew Cronshaw