- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 280, 2006
 

ILGI
Ne Uz Vienu Dienu – Not For Just One Day
Upe UPE CD 069 (2006)

With the restrictions of life in the former Soviet Union and the big changes since Latvia and the other Baltic states bailed out of it, it hasn’t been easy to bring the insistent, narrow-compass minimalist melodies of Latvian traditional music to a world stage. Ilgi, led by singer-fiddler Ilga Reiznice and Māris Muktupāvels, player of kokles, bagpipe and other traditional instruments, have been working on it throughout that period, and it’s been a long road, including collaboration with Ainars Mielavs’ rock band Jauns Mēness, line-up changes and set-toughening US touring.
      In this set of songs of courtship and marriage, rich with nature imagery and sun, god and goddess references, the quintet (the others contributing vocals, guitar, trough fiddle, mandolin, domra, balalaika, bass and percussion) is joined for a track each by Ugandan Samite’s kalimba and voice and Marc Fedder’s banjo, but in general the album, while probably Ilgi’s strongest yet, isn’t radically different in sound from its immediate predecessors. Except, that is, for the much heftier than usual, hypnotically guitar-churning, bass-bowing, bagpipe-squealing incantatory track Dej, Eglite, Lec, Eglite (Fir Tree Is Dancing), a sudden leap into Hedningarna-like territory that might be the one that caught the ears of European world music DJs and propelled the album into the European World Music chart. The packaging too, as usual with releases on Mielavs’s Upe label, is eye-catching.
It’s available online, for a remarkably reasonable price, from www.upe.lv, and three full tracks are listenable there too.


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -