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Written for The Gramophone, 1998

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Yoik - A Presentation of Saami Folk Music
(Boxed set of three discs: 228 minutes: ADD, and 310-page hardback book in parallel-text Swedish and English)
Caprice CAP 21544 (1997)

The Sámi people (foreigners used to call them Lapps) were, it’s thought, the first humans to settle in the Nordic area of northern Europe. In time they were pushed northward by southern tribes, and now their territory is the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and north-west Russia. Criteria for estimating the population vary, but they now number probably no more than 50-75,000, speaking several languages of the Finno-Ugrian family. They have virtually no instrumental tradition, since wood was scarce and they were carriers of few possessions as they followed their reindeer’s seasonal migrations.
      But they did, and do, sing. Their songs, joiku (the spelling, as of all transcribed Sámi words, varies), are one of the most visible displays of an older stratum of European music which is so radically different from what we make now that it doesn’t really mix, and so has continued fairly unmodified by outside influence through centuries, in much the same way as has Native North American music (which in some aspects it resembles). They’re sung, or rather joiked, solo, often with just vocables; when words are used they’re usually descriptive rather than narrative. Using a limited set of notes, and various vocal textures, a singer joiks a person, a place, or an animal, improvising afresh or drawing on an existing joik, in effect writing in or reading from a musical memory-file. A joik to a child may develop as the child grows up; as Wimme Saari says, “joik is like life”.
      There are modern joikers and other Sámi singers who have become well-known largely through their performances with instruments, but the solo form is still alive today; indeed the commercial success of the likes of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Wimme Saari and Mari Boine has helped its revitalisation.
      The splendidly produced boxed set of 3 CDs and a 310-page hardback book, part of Caprice’s classic 25 CD series Musica Sveciae - Folk Music in Sweden, contains all the recordings made on two trips in 1953 for the Swedish Broadcasting Company by Matts Arnberg, Håkan Unsgaard and Israel Ruong. They visited several regions of Swedish Sámiland, recording members of distinct groups including both Forest and Mountain Sámi. The recordings, 195 joiks from 33 people, were state-of-the-art for the time, so quality is fine. Taken just as sound, they can be hard to comprehend, but in conjunction with the book’s descriptions and atmospheric illustrations and photos (very few of which are of the singers, strangely) the whole is a glimpse through a door-crack back to a nearly-forgotten way of music, but one whose scent is strong in the new musical breeze from Norden.
      “So I’ll joik Storfjället’s herd, when the geldings crowded eastward and their antlers touched; but now they’ve disappeared and strangers have come” - Anna Oskarsson, Tärnaby.

Andrew Cronshaw
© The Gramophone 1998
 

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