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Written in Folk Roots issue 173, 1997

DAN GISEN MALMQUIST
Nattljus
Xource XOUCD 116 (1997)

KALABRA
Kalabra
Caprice CAP 21525 (1997)

SUSANNE ROSENBERG
Uppå Marmorns Höga Berg
GIGA GCD 31 (1996)

Clarinettist Dan Gisen Malmquist played American jazz in the circle of musicians, including Ale Möller, who congregated at Malmö’s Jazzådé club in the 70s. Opened up to Swedish folk music, he became a member of Filarfolket and the more folk-rock Avadå Band, and later Trio UGB, as well as playing Greek and Balkan music.
      Nattljus is his second solo album, and opens with the very Scottish-sounding rhythmic air of title track, which like everything here (except Karin Parrot’s song lyrics) is a Malmquist composition. Apart from one track, it’s a virtually polska-free zone. Instrumentation is wide - Gisen plays clarinets from bass upwards and taragot, crumhorn, alto flute and synth, with a musicianly cast including Karin Wallin’s fiddle and nyckelharpa, Lars Holm’s accordion, plus sax, flute, piano, trumpet, guitar, bouzouki, bass and drums. Richly melodic and warmly accessible, it moves naturally through sweeping, refined, muscular and stately, and there are three very fine songs, in an almost Kurt Weill style, sung by Parrot in a wonderful world-weary, café-smoky way.

      At first listen, Kalabra’s impressive debut album has something of the character of a recapitulation of a whole lot of Swedish tradition-rooted music that’s gone before - there are identifiable echoes of, particularly, Groupa and Lena Willemark and Ale Möller’s work. But of course those people have blazed a trail it would be a sin not to investigate (indeed what’s the point in blazing a trail if everyone shrugs and says “very nice” and passes on by?) and Kalabra is finding its own way, as becomes clear as the album progresses, divided about half-and-half between tradition-rooted songs sung by Ulrika Bodén and instrumentals with that new-polska lope, featuring Trio Patrekatt’s Markus Svensson on nyckelharpas, Simon Stålspets on bouzouki, jew’s harp, harmonica and willow flute, Amanda Sedgwick on saxes, and Bodén on flute, with bassist Erik Metall and percussionist Sebastian Printz-Werner.

      Susanne Rosenberg’s Uppå Marmorns Höga Berg (“On The High Marble Mountain”) is devoted to songs from Gästrikland (the region around Gävle), and performed solo and with a vocal group which includes Kalabra’s Ulrika Bodén, sometimes accompanied by Annika Wijnbladh’s cello, Sven Ahlbäck on violin and Mikael Marin’s viola. Their sparse, sensitive arrangements are built on a rich melodic and lyric tradition; there are ballads, herding calls using the high-pitched kulning technique, love songs, a man-teasing-song - “Spins a bit, knits a bit, sews a bit sometimes, but he can’t weave at all”- and a member of the Herring’s Head or Mallard group of European animal-parts songs exaggeratedly listing the things to be made from, in this case, the parts of a crow.


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw



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