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Written in fRoots issue 360, June 2013


UHRBRAND & THORLUND
Neo Traditional Ism
Gateway Music UT 0113 (2013)

SVØBSK KVARTET
Bjergtaget
GO’ GO0413 (2013)

RANNOK
Dejodejo
GO’ GO0123 (2013)

The small Danish island of Fanø, just off the Jutland penisula’s west coast, has retained its dancing and tune tradition and so been a beacon to the present Danish folk revival. But there hasn’t been the mark of a really living tradition – ongoing new composition – in the island’s music until this set of sixteen new Fanø søndørhonings and fanniks from two of its leading musicians, fiddler Peter Uhrbrand and guitarist Nils Thorlund.
     For the CD, rather than just the two instruments they’d generally use for playing for dancing, they’ve made more of a production of it, multitracking themselves on other instruments including piano, keyboards, octave violin and viola, tenor banjo, bass and percussion, which should encourage repeated listens and get these new tunes into local consciousness. To further help other players pick up on them and so bring them into the tradition they’ve made a book of them, plus fifteen more not on the CD, ring-bound so it lies flat when open. Smart, positive thinking; time will tell.
     www.gatewaymusic.dk

     There are three Fanø wedding tunes learnt from Peter Uhrbrand on the album by Svøbsk. The band is a product of the revival, fiddler and singer Jørgen Dickmeiss and piano-accordionist Maren Hallberg having met ten years ago on the folk music course at Odense. For this third CD the duo has expanded to a quartet with Theis Langlands on piano and harmonium and percussionist Simon Busk. Their music is a mix of well-absorbed tradition and new compositions in a wider vein, a skilful blend of dancing spirit and listening elegance, largely instrumental but including the occasional song.

     Theis Langlands is also half of Rannok. Fiddler Michael Graubæk grew up in a musical and dancing family on the big island of Funen, which is between Jutland’s east coast and the Copenhagen island Zealand. The duo’s music, like Svøbsk’s, unfolds new music from traditional roots, and the follow-up CD after their 2011 Danish Music Award winning debut moves between traditional tunes and their own on very well-integrated fiddle and piano, sensitively played with fine command, lift and empathy. They’re augmented by Ale Carr on cittern and Sonnich Lydom on accordion and harmonica.

     Graubæk and Langlands met, as did the Svøbsk duo, ten years ago on Denmark’s only folk music diploma course, at the Southern Denmark Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Funen’s city of Odense. The course has produced a flowering of Danish roots music and of new musics springing from it, but as I write this there’s a plan, being very much resisted by students, teachers and others, to transfer the folk music department across the country to another Academy site in the much smaller city of Esbjerg way over on the west Jutland coast. Though Esbjerg is handy for Fanø, this move will tear the folk roots out of the Odense music scene and presumably cut the very healthy and productive contacts that have built up in Odense between folk music and the Academy’s jazz and classical musicians. There’s a petition at http://tinyurl.com/d259wjv .

www.gofolk.dk



© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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