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Written in Folk Roots issue 163/164, 1997

LENA WILLEMARK & ALE MÖLLER
Agram
ECM 1610 533 099-2

ALE MÖLLER, MATS BERGLUND, GREGER BRÄNDSTRÖM, LASSE SÖRLIN
Härjedalspipan
Drone DROCD 008

Within the past year Möller and Willemark released the very rich and powerful Hästen Och Tranan, yet already here’s another of equal splendour.
      The line-up is the same as on 1994’s Nordan. There have been live performances of that project since its recording, and the group flight-muscles that have developed are evident in Agram. All the musicians - Mats Edén, Tina Johansson, Palle Danielsson and Jonas Knutsson - are long-time Möller-Willemark collaborators, but the traditional ballad centred Nordan brought them together as an ensemble for the first time, drawing together their links into both deep tradition and the new and very distinctive Nordic jazz in which bassist Danielsson and saxist Knutsson are leading figures. Indeed it seems that in the Nordic countries that special thing is happening: not an exploratory but sterile fusionism, but two traditions exchanging meaningful glances, touching, coupling and creating a new being.
      It’s wonderfully wild, luminous music, full of rhythmic twists and vibrant instrumental textures so colourful and real you want to stroke them, by turns sparsely interweaving and heart-liftingly soaring, of fiddle, drone-fiddle, sax, shawm, mandola, wooden trumpet, lute, flute, harp, hammered dulcimer and double-bass and percussion, and there on top and amongst is Willemark’s magnificent singing, commanding, strident yet warm, extraordinarily acute and intense, deeply silky or writing on the sky with kulning.

      Yet another fine piece of work involving Ale Möller has appeared in the past year. Actually Härjedalspipan was previously released in 1991 as an LP on Nadir, but doesn’t seem to have been as widely publicised as it deserved. Now it’s a CD on Drone.
      In Härjedalen a particular distinctive form of the Swedish wooden whistle was played, but fell into disuse. Möller, fiddler Mats Berglund and instrument maker Oskar Olofsson revived it. The new-made instrument, which has a very expressive breathy tone, is played (apart from the last five tracks, which are archive recordings of, and a brief interview with, the instrument’s last-known player, and a good one at that, Olof Jonsson, who died in 1961) by Möller, with the fiddles of Berglund and Greger Brändström, the fiddle and occasional zither of Lasse Sörlin and natural foot-percussion, in a set of tunes from the Härjedalen area. This isn’t the sound of academic reconstruction - it’s a lively, varied album, well recorded, full of strong tunes and full-blooded playing - the sort of thing we’ve come to expect of Ale Möller.


© 1996 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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