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Written in Folk Roots issue 163/164, 1997

MARI BOINE
Eallin
Antilles 533 799-2 (1996)

The magnetic intensity of Mari Boine’s on-stage persona, the culture she reflects, the sound of her North Sámi language, her joik-rooted exploration of vocal sounds and the powerful, vibrant minimalism, rock-stripped-bare, of the band all contribute to her distinctive position in European music.
     The present-day Nordic radical remodelling of jazz and rock and its open relationship with traditional music involves in part a move away from the vertical polyphonic harmony which has prevailed in Europe for so long, back towards forms drawing their richness from the texture and shape of the note, and their energy from rhythmic stresses and balances. It pulls in ideas from other traditions, many of them fundamentally linear, predominantly monophonic or duophonic, and there are glimpses in the Boine band’s instrumental work - only fleetingly discernible and never creating a detour - of Indian, Arabic and Native North and South American musics.
      A live album can be seen as an extra in a performer’s discography, offering nothing much new except a punchier version of studio recordings and put out in lieu of a “real” album. But for many, probably most, musicians live performance is the centre of what they do; that’s true for Mari Boine, and this album is an important release, and a good place to start if you’ve never heard her (given that a rare chance to see her live in Britain has just passed - she was at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in November, and the show went out live on Radio 3).
      Her best-known song, Gula Gula (“Hear The Voices Of The Foremothers”) appears, in the form to which it has evolved since she first recorded it and over the time in which others including Jan Garbarek have turned it into a Sámi classic. Some other songs, such as the opening Mielahisvuohta, (“A State Of Mind Where Your Intellect Is Disconnected” - there’s no snappy English equivalent of the word), and Vuolgge Mu Mielde Bassivárrái (“Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain”) were on earlier albums, but these are live, going-for-it treatments, finely crafted and with the band’s usual supremely subtle yet driving live sound, not re-creations of the studio version, and several haven’t appeared on record before.


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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