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Written in fRoots issue 345, 2012


HILJA GRÖNFORS & LATSO DZINTA
Kai Tu Dzaha? – Where Are You Going?
Global Music Centre GMCD 1122 (2011)

For years Hilja Grönfors gathered, virtually alone, the songs traditional within her Finnish Roma communities, and sang them when she could.
     In 2005 she was honoured as an important tradition-bearer with the title mestaripelimanni by Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, and taken to the heart of the Finnish folk music scene. In time a group of non-Roma musicians gathered to accompany her and became Latso Dzinta, and she has also been lauded in bigger concert productions involving leading folk and rock musicians.
     She handles it with great dignity and grace, dressed in the elaborate lace-ruffled, big-skirted attire that she and many Finnish Roma women still wear as their normal clothes, and her singing, soaring, sensitively hovering, beautifully poised and richly musical, seems with the increased attention she now receives to have gained even more in confidence and stature without any loss of her warm, honest modesty and charm.
     On this second album with the group the songs are of sadness, poverty, suffering, prison, but also of the pleasure of love, roses, horses, sleigh-driving and outdoor life.
     Hilja’s songs and singing, mainly in Finnish but sometimes Romani, while in some stylistic touches, particularly slide and vibrato, comparable to that of Roma from further east, and sometimes that of Scottish travellers, have a distinctive Finnish Roma character.
     But in Finland, while there are a few Roma guitarists and accordionists, there isn’t the strong tradition and skill-pool of Roma song accompaniment that exists in central and eastern Europe, and much of her singing was in the past perforce unaccompanied. So the band has pretty much had to develop its own approach, and what they’ve come up with is natural and sympathetic, a flowing mix of Valtteri Brun’s manouche-influenced guitar, Kiureli Sammallahti’s central-European-tinged accordion, Kukka Lehto’s emotional violin, Riku Kettunen’s trilling, chopping mandolin and Sara Puljula’s double bass.
     www.globalmusic.fi


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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