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Written in fRoots issue 316, 2009
 

STOCKHOLM LISBOA PROJECT
Diagonal
Westpark WP 87177 (2009)

This is the band whose lead singer is London-resident fadista and O Fado restaurateuse Liana Costa, the subject of a Root Salad written by Jamie Renton in fR 313.
      Violinist Sérgio Crisóstomo played traditional and classical music back home in Portugal before moving to Sweden and getting drawn into Scandinavian music and finding within it two musicians who were interested in Portuguese music. Filip Jers plays the range of harmonicas from diatonic through chromatic to bass, and Simon Stålspets, of Svart Kaffe and earlier Kalabra, plays one of those new-Nordic mandolas with extended bass strings. The latter has a fatter, more gutty and wide-range sound than the silvery liquidity of the usual fado instrument, Portuguese guitarra; harmonicas haven’t really been used in fado before, and the fiddle is hardly a core fado instrument.
      But the essence of vocal fado isn’t the instrumentation, it’s the singing style and the song. And Liana is an impressive and attractive singer, here not just performing fado, and a passionate new fado-style song by Simon and Liana that draws on the power at the high end of her vocal range, but also a fast corridinho dance-song from Alentejo, and her lyrics to a tune learnt recently by Sérgio from an old fiddler in Portugal’s north. She pitches in with the Nordic material, too, writing Portuguese lyrics to Swedish and Finnish songs and blending a Coimbra fado with a well-known Swedish song from the Åland archipelago. The songs are mainly from Liana, but the guys sometimes take vocals too, and add in instrumentals including a couple of polskas written by Sérgio, a waltz by Simon and a schottis by Filip.
      There’s no special history of musical connection between their two countries - sailors or traders in antiquity or whatever. This is a new connection, but a natural one. If people love the music of two places, and inhabit both, why not play them together, and see how they blend? They do, and this is a proper group, beginning to transcend the sort of cross-cultural experiment that the name suggests, with an appealing debut album and, as the couple of City of London Festival gigs in our sunshine-and-showers summer showed, considerable live charm.

      www.westparkmusic.eu, www.stockholmlisboa.com, www.myspace.com/stockholmlisboaproject


© 2009 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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