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Written in Folk Roots issue 142, 1995

MYNTA
Nandu’s Dance
Xource XOUCD 107 (1994)

HOVEN DROVEN
Hia Hia
Xource XOUCD 110 (1994)

Swedish musicians have been exploring many territories over the last few years, learning styles and techniques and bringing them home to either reinterpret traditional music or create new musical islands.

      Mynta, formed in 1979, has since 1989 comprised two Indian musicians, Fazal Qureshi (tabla and vocals) and Nandkishor Muley (santoor, tanpura and vocals), and four Swedes: Anders Hagberg on flutes, sax and keyboards, Max Åhman (guitar, saz, keyboard), bassist Christian Paulin and percussionist Mikael Nilsson. The music on Nandu’s Dance consists of dazzlingly tight tabla-driven playing of Euro-Indian compositions by band members, fundamentally instrumental but with vocal episodes of which several are percussion-vocalisations; it’s another of the characterful meetings between cultures in which musicians in both Sweden and Norway currently show so much facility.

      Hoven Droven’s Hia Hia has the feel of a Swedish Morris On: splashy, cheerfully energetic, scrub-finish, non-pompous folk-rock treatments of dance tunes, with enough of the source material showing through, here in the form of field-type recordings of speech or tune at track openings, to make it an affectionate bringing-out of some aspects of the tunes rather than a “what this old stuff needs is a kick up from the bum from rock’n’roll” sort of thing. There’s a dry, non-overt humour coupled with accurately-applied unselfish skill and awareness which marks out prime folk-rock, and this has it. The playfulness extends to an unscheduled thirteenth track, an acoustic tune led by Pedro Blom’s harmonica.
      As with England's Morris On it’s the dance rhythms and tunes themselves that stamp themselves on the brain, and in Swedish dance music it’s no bad thing to develop such a corner of comprehension in preparation for a trip into the wider world of polska and halling. As in other leading Swedish bands, the members are no opportunist outsiders with slim comprehension of the traditional lake on which they skate - trumpeter Gustav Hylén, for example, is a veteran of Groupa - so their folk-rock springs from the tunes, it doesn’t force them into its rhythmic ways. It just shows them, and perhaps a hitherto unreached public, another kind of dance-filled good time.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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