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Written in
fRoots
issue 299, 2008
KRISTINE HEEBØLL
10 Point
GO’ GO 1107 (2007)
MAY MONDAY
Midnight
May Monday Adventures MMA 6327001 (2007)
SVÄNG
Jarruta
Aito AICD 013 (2008)
Three albums, from Danish, Finnish, Swedish and British musicians, with varied
approaches but a unifying factor of extraordinarily fine composition and
arrangement.
It’s only a few months since Trio Mio’s
Stories Around A Holy Goat, yet here’s Danish violinist Kristine Heebøll
with an album of her own compositions. Trio Mio was originally formed to play
the music she’d written for her first album, and has gone on to be a very fine
and agile live unit in which the other two members now also contribute tunes and
songs. 10 Point (ten tracks, and you get ten points in car trip I-spy for
seeing a field full of cows all lying down) is another solo album, with a
different set of musicians.
Beginning with a duet with Dan Gisen Malmquist’s
clarinet, the sound increases in breadth and complexity, bringing in three other
bowers – the fiddles, viola and cello of Ditte Fromseier Mortensen, Andreas
Tophøj and Cecillie Lenee Hyldgaard - and the rich underpinning woodiness of
Gisen’s bass clarinet. It’s an ideal combination that can be a multi-fiddle
spelmanslag or a reed-enriched string quartet, in strong melodies and breathing,
flexing arrangements, dance-lifting or serenely Vaughan Williams or Grainger
evocative.
The May Monday pairing of UK accordionist Karen
Tweed and Finnish piano-player Timo Alakotila, following up 2001’s debut album
with Midnight, brings long-lined, melodically complex arrangements of
material written by Tweed, Alakotila and other leading present day tune-writers
including Antti Järvelä, Chris Wood, Andy Cutting, Ian Lowthian, Alan Kelly,
Maire Breatnach, John Dipper and the other two members of the core quartet here,
guitarist Roger Tallroth and fiddler Emma Reid.
Much of the original May Monday album,
while it involved Tallroth and seven other players, was centrally a duo or trio
album and had a prevailing reflective feel. This one, while still pausing for
calm moments and showing even more ingenuity coupled with sensitivity, has a
greater prevalence of fast, intricate playing, with Tweed drawing on her Irish
music background as well as the wider musical palette that’s characteristic of
all the three CDs in this review. It’s heftier too; Alakotila spends more time
in muscular rolling, swung-syncopated piano-driving than elegantly limpid lines,
and the full Tweed/Alakotila/Tallroth/Reid quartet plays on most tracks,
augmented by Neil Yates’s agile flügelhorn, the fiddles of Gerard and Bernard
Kilbride and John Dipper, and Ursula Leveaux’s bassoon.
The Finnish harmonica rascals Sväng return with
Jarruta, making a mighty sound that it might be hard to believe all comes
from mouth-organs. The pounding, tuba-punching bass end comes largely from Pasi
Leino’s bass harmonica, an instrument that doesn’t usually sound acoustically
very bassy except at close range, so Leino’s is fitted with close mics. On top
of that is Jouko Kyhälä’s Harmonetta, a rectangular metal sandwich-like object
fitted with buttons that operate reed-groups as chords, and the smaller and more
familiar diatonic and chromatic harmonicas played by Eero Grundström, Eero
Turkka and Kyhälä.
Their material here, largely self-written, draws
on the music of the Balkans, Finnish Roma, Finnish fiddling, Lucky Luke comics
and Japanese anime soundtracks. Their exploitation to the full of the ability of
diatonic and chromatic harmonicas to pitch-bend, with usually more than one
instrument doing that at a time, gives a wonderfully greasy, slithering feel to
the music. From keeningly, soaringly melancholic through chuggy cartoon
perkiness to a churning, menacing fuzz-harmonica transformation of a Finnish
Roma song to wide-screen massiveness, the playing and arrangements are works of
brilliance. So much more than just a smart idea in ironic big suits, this is a
unique combo, not just among harmonica bands but anywhere.
www.gofolk.dk,
www.myspace.com/maymonday,
www.aitorecords.com
© 2008
Andrew Cronshaw
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Links:
fRoots - The feature and
review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews
were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti (Finland's national Folk Music Institute).
It's not practical to give, and keep up to date,
current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in
these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the
artists.
Helsinki's Digelius Music
record shop is a great source of Finnish roots and other albums.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by
Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews,
of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine
Rootsworld.com
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