- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 295/296, 2008
 

TRIO MIO
Stories Around A Holy Goat
GO’ Danish Folk Music GO 0707 (2007)

Perhaps the best evidence for a successful musical revival, be it folk music or any other, isn’t so much the numbers of people participating but the creation of a flow of new material that’s at least as strong as the old repertoire.
      If that’s the case, then proof that the Danish roots music revival is doing well resides in Trio Mio – fiddler Kristine Heebøll, piano, accordion and harmonium player Nikolaj Busk and (admittedly Swedish) bouzouki and guitar player Jens Ulvsand.
      What began as a band to accompany Heebøll’s tunes has become a melody-factory, with all three of them composing; melodies, and tightly structured harmonisation and arrangements that draw on folk forms and rhythms to make pieces that, as well as having the lift, energy and space for individual expression of folk music, could well enliven a classical string quartet’s repertoire. Heebøll’s shapely, uplifting Wedding Waltz For Mari And Johnny, for example, in which the trio are joined, as they are in Busk’s big Øresund March, by a trio of Swedes: Dan Gisen Malmquist on clarinets, Anders Ådin’s on hurdy-gurdy and Ola Hertsberg’s nyckelharpa. A scattering of songs by Ulvsand have begun to slide into the flow, too, over the last couple of albums.
      The album ends with Pigeon Scottish, which begins as a tango, morphs into schottische, back into lyrical accordion-led tango, overlays the two, introduces some spoken-word muttering, back into schottische with vocal tralling, and ends, echoing the title of the last album Pigeon Folk Pieces, with pigeons cooing the tango rhythm.
      No goat though. (Well, just a piece - track four is a traditional Swedish hornlåt)
      It’s to be had from www.gofolk.dk (the album, not the goat – get that from www.goatfolk.dk…).


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw



You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

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.

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.
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 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -