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Written in fRoots issue 269, 2006
 

TRIO MIO
Pigeon Folk Pieces
GO’ Danish GO 0805 (2005)

Trio Mio was the name of Danish fiddler Kristine Heebøll’s solo album of her own compositions, released in 2004, a gem of Denmark’s unfolding roots music creativity. Its core group was the trio of herself, guitarist and bouzouki player Jens Ulvsand, and pianist and accordionist Nikolaj Busk, which has since emerged as an excellent live band. (There was a feature about the three of them in fR265). Now, hard on its heels – perhaps too hard on its heels in this CD-deluged world - comes the first actual Trio Mio album.
      The result of a head of tune-writing steam that had been building up in Heebøll for some time after she left Phønix, Trio Mio was an impressive piece of composing and playing and is still very much in the memory. It might seem remarkable that there would be enough tunes for another album so soon, only a year and some later, but this time the three of them share the composing.
      As probably befits an album establishing Trio Mio as an actual gigging band, this one focuses on that line-up – no string quartet, no guest singer - just the trio throughout, except for trumpet on one track, the stately Edderfuglen, a piece with hints of Shetland dedicated to a boat that took escaping Jews from Denmark to Sweden in WW2.
      On gigs occasional vocals are creeping in; there’s one here from Ulvsand, adding his own lyrics in Heebøll’s Poppel, a celebration of the poplar tree, and there’s some wordless group vocalising as Busk’s skipping piano swings the Mats Edén tune Modus Mats out to where it was definitely asking to go. Busk’s own piano-led air Atitlan, written about a lake in Guatemala but Scottish-sounding, could well catch on among other players, as should many of the tunes on both albums. His late-night Den Sidste he plays as a reflective solo on just the melody end of the accordion, and the trio follow it the album closer, the elegant Anglaise written by Lang Linken’s Keld Nørgaard.
      Pigeon Folk Pieces’ predecessor’s fullness of rich, varied compositions is a hard act to beat, but this new set are growers.


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw



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