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Written in fRoots issue 222, 2001
 

ULRIKA BODÉN
Vålje Å Vrake
Drone DROCD 024 (2001)

GUNNFJAUNS KAPELL
Dansä Läite
Sjelvar SJECD 14 (2001)

GUNNEL MAURITZSON
Åter
Xource XOUCD 131 (2001)

After a string of albums singing with bands - Kalabra, Sälta, Ranarim, Rosenbergs Sjua - for her first solo project Ulrika Bodén has turned to the traditional music of Ångermanland, the region of her home village of Helgum in eastern central Sweden.
      Her singing has always had a natural, direct freshness, and with this album it seems to have gained a new confidence and command. In some songs she’s unaccompanied; in most she’s eloquently accompanied by Ranarim colleagues Niklas Roswall (nyckelharpas, chord zither) and Jens Engelbrecht (guitar, mandola, kantele) joined by Hedningarna’s Anders Norudde on stråkharpa, moraharpa, fiddle, whistle or Swedish bagpipe. Subtly crafty in arrangement, drawing out and pointing up the spirit of the material, the sound is very complete, needing no bass lines nor percussion. Together they lift into fresh new life material, rarely if ever heard from other contemporary performers, learnt from old radio recordings, transcriptions and from visits to some of the surviving old singers including Ester Isaksson from Helgum, a snatch of whose singing of the title song opens a very attractive album. The title means “picking and choosing” and she has obviously done just that; there’s nothing superfluous here.

      Gunnfjauns Kapell specialises in the music of its homeland, Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic that was an important Germanic trading centre in the Middle Ages. Dansä Läite is the band’s sixth album, but the fact that most of them bear on their rather formal sleeves varying versions of the same painting, and very similar blurb on the back - in fact identical this time to last - gives the impression it’s a string of reissues of the same one. Odd; perhaps it’s an Yves Tanguy type of slow-growth artistic statement of continuity.
      The music’s similar, too, but it’s consistently efficiently executed, a mix of songs and dance tunes drawn, with the exception of a clutch of originals, from published collections made in Gotland over the past century or so The tunes are mostly polskas, but these polskas don’t have the multifaceted pushed rhythms of those of Dalarna and some other parts of the mainland; they sit more squarely on a regular 3/4 pulse, and the band plays them with a sprightly, springy baroque or Playford sort of feel. The songs include a ballad, dance songs and children’s songs. Instrumentation, from Annika Björkegren, Owe Ronström, Bengt Arwidsson and Jan Ekedahl, consists of flutes, fiddle, mandolin, accordion, and guitar, bouzouki or octave mandola, and this album features a new singer, Charlotte Berg.

      Her predecessor in the band was Gunnel Mauritzson. On her latest solo project, Åter, Mauritzson delivers with mature calmness and elegant control her own and trad material, drawing on Gotlandic roots and the uncluttered articulacy and rhythmic ingenuity of Nordic new-jazz, with occasional hints of tabla-vocal or African music. Surrounding her, combining fine command of traditional idioms with fluently structured arrangements, is a classy, microtone-understanding Swedish-roots team of soprano saxist/flautist Anders Hagberg, Väsen guitarist Roger Tallroth, Groupa keyboardist Rickard Åström and Forsmark Tre fiddler Hans Kennemark.


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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