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Written in fRoots issue 268, 2005
 

KRISTIAN BUGGE
Kristian Bugge
Danish Radio P2 RADIUM 01-04 (2005)

A very strong debut album by a fiddler of great facility and lift who’s obviously going to be, indeed already is, a major mover as the Danish roots wave gathers momentum.
      The opening polka, like several tracks, could create the assumption one was listening to English ceilidh music, and perhaps wondering which of the current Anglo-roots team are involved. But while of course polkas are common in English dance music, so it’s not surprising to hear some similarities, there’s something different, an intriguing accent.
      Other tracks are more clearly different in form and approach from English music, and also from the dance music of neighbour Sweden. The tunes known as Sønderhonings, peculiar to the village of Sønderho on the island of Fanø near Esbjerg, are particularly distinctive. This is music taking a new evolutionary step, though; there’s a youthful energy to it and, as with all living traditions, it reflects the musical life of its players. One Sønderhoning, for example, is paired in a natural way with a Greco-Turkish tune.
      These couple dances, and tunes for them, spread across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In other Nordic countries they were twisted in particular ways, taking on local characteristics, and so they were in Denmark too, but to a less extreme extent. But with the small country’s accessibility to and influence from the sea, and across its land border with the rest of mainland Europe, and with changing patterns of life and work, by the latter half of the twentieth century the local traditions had dwindled, just surviving in a few pockets, each with their own local styles. Most of the tunes on this album come from these communities, such as Læsø and Fanø, or from fiddlers’ manuscript tune books.
      Kristian Bugge has studied violin and fiddling in Moscow, Malung, and at that kitchen of new Danish roots music the Carl Nielsen Academy in Odense, and in 2004 he became the first to receive Danish Radio P2’s new Radium Award, which is given to an “undiscovered” young musician. Part of the prize was the chance to make a CD (which is not only released in the usual retail way but also came with the June issue of the Danish magazine Folk & Musik, published by the Danish Folk Council).
      Bugge seized the opportunity, bringing in a choice team of friends from among the new northern European wave playing a well-blending and varied mix of acoustic instruments, in which his fiddling sits as a constituent part, rather than making a solo tour de force. Featuring on six of the thirteen tracks is the Baltic Crossing group, a collaborative project that first met at guitarist Ian Stephenson’s home in Newcastle. As well as Stephenson and Bugge, the Crossing includes Northumbrian and uilleann piper Andy May, bodhrán player and percussionist Cormac Byrne, and Finnish fiddlers and multi-instrumentalists Antti and Esko Järvelä (who are both members of Frigg, written about elsewhere in this issue). This album is Baltic Crossing’s recording debut. They’re joined by others from Denmark, Sweden and Finland adding trombone, nyckelharpa and accordion and diddling vocals, and two musicians who’ve been influential in carrying Danish roots music this far: Peter Uhrbrand on piano and Sonnich Lydom on harmonica and two-row.
      The result is finely-judged fiddling with varied, fresh arrangements from the ensemble. And, paradoxically, the application of musicians from several other traditions brings out the distinctiveness of the Danish tunes and the fiddling styles of which Bugge is a prime exponent.


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw



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