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Written in
fRoots
issue 294, 2007
FRIGG
Live
Frigg FRIGG 00003 (2007)
TÖTTERSSÖN
XO
Visio VISIO 0003 (2007)
TSUUMI SOUND SYSTEM
Hotas
Aito AICD 010 (2007)
NÄPPÄRIT
Näppärit 25v.
Own label, no number (2007)
VILLE KANGAS
Qwenland
Tutl SHD 72 (2007)
For the last couple of years there’s been something of a lull in releases of
Finnish roots CDs, but now several of the most happening live bands have
released strong albums that really show what they’re capable of.
Frigg, the fiddle band comprising some of
Kaustinen’s hottest young fiddlers with the Larsen brothers from Norway, has
been making waves with high-energy live shows across Europe, including making a
lot of new friends at WOMAD in the UK straight after setting Estonia’s Viljandi
alight, and becoming Prairie Home Companion regulars on their frequent tours in
North America. Frigg makes very shapely melodies, with all the resonance and
memorability of tradition but most of them written by band members, particularly
bassist/fiddler Antti Järvelä and fiddler/multi-instrumentalist Esko Järvelä;
this is a living tradition, in direct line from the compositions of earlier
generations of Kaustinen fiddlers and on through the JPP phenomenon. Fiddling
and tune-making in the Kaustinen scene continues to spiral higher and higher,
and Frigg shows just how high it’s getting.
Frigg Live isn’t simply a set of live
versions of their two studio albums, but includes several new tunes and a big
final track based on Norwegian and Finnish traditional tunes and featuring a
vocal group, Petri Prauda’s Estonian bagpipes and Esko on piano that has an
almost Carmina Burana-like wild power. This is an excellent album, well worth
getting in addition to the studio albums, with the caveat that compared with the
studio albums it’s adrenaline-fuelled. Some of the subtleties of the line-up,
too, are less in evidence in this live context than they might be in the less
soundcheck-pressured environment of the studio; specifically Prauda’s bagpipes
and Tuomas Logrén’s gifted slide playing on dobro, an unusual instrument in this
fiddle-band context; worryingly, for foreign shows this summer he seems to have
been leaving it at home and favouring normal acoustic guitar.
Tötterssön is Kaustinen’s current top folk-thrash
band, and makes music that could only be from Kaustinen. Local youth heroes,
great players, fiddling with mad energy while singing songs in Finnish and
Ostrobothnian dialect that make the most sense to the local youth audience.
Their annual midnight spectacular at Kaustinen festival this year featured a
naked-men’s-chorale (well, the front row wore a sock). But, even though they
were only really intended as some unpretentious local fun, and they’re certainly
having that, they’ve made an album whose energy, wit and tune-making is such
that I think it’s reached a point where they should and could burst out on the
wider world.
This is the most archetypal and simultaneously
contemporary sound of Kaustinen, a village whose crest is a fiddle, and it
really emphasises how different this music is from anything that could
conceivably be called Celtic, while the players are well able to communicate in
that fiddling world too. Fronted by Suggs-like singer-fiddler Kyösti Järvelä,
the line-up features two more fiddles, Frigg’s Esko Järvelä on hard-smacked
harmonium, plus guitar and bass, they come across like a manic JPP with vocal
punctuations and bouts of joyful scratchiness turning on a Euro-cent to the
tightest sweet-toned fiddle harmonising.
They’re wild and witty, unafraid of crass, but
they play brilliantly and tight in the joyful, top-string celebrating Kaustinen
style and their tunes, mostly written by Kyösti, are varied and memorable and
fit perfectly into the tradition and evoke strong echoes of all the Kaustinen
music that has brought them this far. It would, will, be interesting to see what
foreigners make of a Tötterssön assault; quite a lot, I suspect.
Tsuumi Sound System is based down south in
Helsinki, but there are a plenty of Kaustinen connections in its music, both in
sound and personnel – its two fiddlers are Frigg and Tötterssön’s Esko Järvelä
and Tommi Asplund, who regularly deps in Frigg. The rest of the octet comprises
accordion, piano, harmonium, electric and acoustic guitars, sax, double bass and
drums. It began as, and still is, the band for Tsuumi, a pro dance company
basing its work on folk dance, and it has made earlier albums of music written
or arranged for that purpose, but Hotas, while very danceable, is music
by the band for itself, and it’s a very strong band indeed, as their storming
show at this year’s Kaustinen festival showed. The very strong and intricate
material, written by Järvelä, accordionist Hannu Kella and piano and harmonium
player Pilvi Talvitie, feels like an extension of the Kaustinen sound into
something even heftier, with a very full, rich sound; Väsen’s Roger Tallroth,
who knows a fair bit about how to do drive and swing, produced.
Kaustinen has been famous for its fiddling for
generations, but the standard and number of players today is higher than it’s
ever been, and much of that is the result of the teaching of JPP’s Mauno Järvelä
over the past twenty-five or so years All music teachers everywhere should see
what he does and has achieved with children, mainly from the Kaustinen area but
also spawning and linking up with projects in other parts of Finland and abroad,
including South Africa. It lifts the heart to hear a couple of hundred of his
pupils, known as Näppärit (“The Nippers”) playing together in Kaustinen arena,
not just fiddles but the range of bowed strings plus harmoniums, as sweet and as
tight as any adult orchestra (and playing happily among them are Näppärit alumni
who are now members of Frigg, Tötterssön, JPP and other bands).
The material, mainly written by Mauno but also by
other Kaustinen tune-smiths and from the tradition, is full of memorable tunes
and fitted perfectly to the skills and enthusiasms of the children it
incorporates influences from popular, Texan, Hungarian and other musics. And
songs are a key component, and in his lyrics Mauno injects some wider knowledge;
if they’re going to learn and sing lyrics they might as well be about something.
It’s amazing to see the children, of all ages from very small, clutching their
fiddles of varying sizes and singing with genuine, open-faced gusto, a rhyming
list of philosophers or a song about sixteenth-century clergyman Mikael Agricola
(who created today’s written Finnish when he translated the New Testament into
the language), all without a hint of schooliness.
Mauno, now assisted by a team including his
daughters Alina (a member of Frigg with brother Esko) and Aili, is one of the
world’s great teachers. Näppärit 25v consists of recordings, of smaller
ensembles as well as the massed fiddles, made in 1989, 1993 and 2007. It’s not
‘kids’ music’, to be tolerated and patted condescendingly; replete with good
tunes played tight and light, it’s a delight and an inspiration.
One Näppärit alumnus, who has made a considerable
repayment to the fund by writing and arranging some fine material for them
including a couple of the pieces on Näppärit 25v., is Ville Kangas. A
leading Kaustinen fiddler, a quiet man with deep knowledge of the local
repertoire as well as of Celtic, American, Swedish and other fiddling, Kangas
has steadfastly trodden a quirky renegade path, plunging into pop and
session-playing, favouring a personal, sometimes perverse, approach to tone and
processing on his electric fiddle and Irish bouzouki, and constructing albums
and bands that explore deep into rockism and dense textures, with each project
developing his expression of his very individual musical persona.
His new project, Qwenland, uses hefty
jazz-rocky sounds and wild squeeings in complex, direction-changing tune
constructions that emerge into occasional clearings of unmistakeable Kaustinen
fiddling, and this time there are as many songs as there are instrumentals. The
singer is Mauno Järvelä’s daughter Aili, who also fiddles and plays harmonica.
Some are wordless vocalising, but the lyrics of couple of them, one about the
mythical Kalevala quest-object, the Sampo, are by another talented
Kaustinian, poet Antti Huntus. It’s yet another step into we know not where for
Kangas’s music; one day this man will reverse into unexpected stardom. What he’s
doing seems a long way from Kaustinen wedding-band music, but Kangas is
conditioned by his birthplace and his muscularly drifting, grinding, riffing
music, wherever it may fit, is very much a part of its unique living culture.
www.frigg.fi,
www.aitorecords.com,
www.tutl.com
© 2007
Andrew Cronshaw
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