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Written in fRoots issue 289, 2007
 

NI:D
[ni:d]
Academus KMHCD 15 (2006)

This is wonderfully intelligent music. Just fiddle, soprano sax and percussion, from Mia Gustafsson, Hanna Wiskari and Gjallarhorn’s Petter Berndalen.
      As has become increasingly apparent in today’s Swedish roots music, the silky roundness of the soprano sax and the friction of the fiddle complement one another excellently, and Gustafsson and Wiskari are masters of those instruments, tracking in unison, harmony or diverging melodic lines with quick response and tremendous empathy.
      One might expect the percussion to simply lay down the groove over which the other two sit, but that isn’t what Berndalen does. Unusually among percussionists he knows traditional music as well as any melody instrument player and has, as he puts it, “a passion for musical details”; using a very individual, beautifully integrated and tuned percussion kit he picks out and intensifies the twists and turns of the melody, and is as able to contribute as meaningfully to a tune with free rhythm as to one with a steady pulse. Anyway, few of these Swedish and Norwegian tunes and originals have any kind of clock rhythm; they pull and swing and lurch splendidly, and the three players treat them as a musical conversation, rather as does one of their mentors, Ellika Frisell, in her duets with Solo Cissokho. But whereas Ellika and Solo is a cross-cultural meeting, these three are conversing in the same traditional-musical language.
      It’s a custom in Swedish and Norwegian folk music to credit one’s influences, and these three continue that un-egotistical tradition, citing fiddlers Frisell, Sven Ahlbäck, Mats Berglund, Hans W. Brimi and the album’s producer Mikael Marin, saxists Jonas Knutsson and Sten Källman and percussionists Terje Isungset and André Ferrari. All of those, themselves highly recommended for your further investigation, should be proud to have had a hand in Ni:d’s extraordinarily articulate music.
      Find them, and hear tracks, at www.nidmusic.com and www.myspace.com/nidmusic


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw



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