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Written in fRoots issue 286, 2007
 

GÖRAN MÅNSSON
Mon
Nordic Tunes NT 001 (2006)

PELLE BJÖRNLERT & JOHAN HEDIN
Musikanter, Polskor Och Andanter
Giga GCD-76

Showing the non-bowed-instrument side of Nordic dance music, in his second solo album Mon Gjallarhorn’s Månsson plays traditional and a few self-composed tunes on a range of breathy Nordic wooden whistles – Härjedal pipe, Offerdal pipe, Norwegian sjøfløyte and his newly-designed Månmarka pipe – plus flauto d’amore and alto and contrabass recorders, with just one funky, breath-percussive workout on his mighty electrified subcontrabass recorder.
      Most of the traditional tunes, which include polskas, marches, a waltz, a schottisch, a song tune and a hymn tune, come from the repertoires of Jonk Jonas Persson and the Lång family, of Månsson’s family home town of Haverö in Sweden’s Norrland region. He’s accompanied by Väsen’s Roger Tallroth on guitars and bouzouki. Månsson’s own compositions here tend to be slow and lyrical, with Tallroth gracing Till Lisa, a memorial to a friend, with atmospherically reverbed slide guitar. The other half of the Gjallarhorn rhythm section, Petter Berndalen, joins for a couple of tracks, one of them a duet in which the latter displays the percussion possibilities of the overlapping rhythmic lurches of polska.

      Back to Sweden’s ubiquitous bowed strings. The top-class teaming of Pelle Björnlert’s fiddle with Johan Hedin’s newly-created tenor nyckelharpa blends excellently in the polskas, marches and wedding tunes from south Sweden they play on Musikanter, Polskor Och Andanter. These tunes don’t lurch asymmetrically like the polskas of further north but are elegant and almost baroque-classical in form and the duo’s treatment which, while impelled by traditional verve, is a rich-sounding chording counterpoint, sometimes with pizzicato, the wide pitch spread of the nyckelharpa meshing with the fiddle like the other three members of a string quartet.


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw



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