If you have set your folk radar to scan the landscape a bit deeper, you may already be familiar with Sarah-Jane (fiddle, Scotland) and Juhani (guitars, Finland), both long time residents in Norway. Both have their own, widely respected careers in contemporary music but together, they have created several works that both retain and renew – sometimes radically – the axioms of Nordic folk music.
Their previous collaborations have been mostly just the two of them, with the exception of Sølvstrøk that featured an entire chamber orchestra. Now, How To Raise The Wind settles in the middle ground, with Sarah-Jane and Juhani performing with a smaller ensemble consisting of choice Scottish and Norwegian musicians such as Patsy Reid and Rikard Toften Holst.
Again, the artists themselves describe best what this work is about: How to Raise the Wind is inspired by Scottish and Norwegian folk tales. It tightly integrates through-composed chamber music with the duo’s idiosyncratic traditional sound, and is coloured by contemporary music and jazz. And there it is, they saved me the trouble of writing all that 😄
If you’ve heard their previous works, the musical and technical virtuosity comes as no surprise. And if you haven’t, here’s your chance to witness it, so I will say no more about something that’s very obvious when you just listen.
But what I do want to say is this: apart from ambitious stylistic mixes and Class A playing from everyone here, this album is simply fascinating – and so much fun, too!
Or what else can you say of an album that kicks off with a tune called Trolls Resent a Disturbance and plays like a folk/classical soundtrack to that event, with Sarah-Jane displaying the fiddle’s (or maybe violin’s here) narrative power to the full.
The eight-minute Polkadots and Moonshinec omes next and is, for me, the high point of this excellent album. Written already a few years ago, it’s a splending example of how the line between classical and traditional can be broken and turned into a wonderful no man’s land where labels lose their meaning altogether and it’s just the music that matters.
You get the idea. Before the album ends, you will have encountered music from very traditional to very modern and to hybrids of both worlds. It is thanks to Sarah-Jane and Juhani’s artistic genius that the 44 minutes of music comes across as one cohesive work and not a collection compositions hopping mindlessly from one musical universe to another.
And for all its high artistic merit and overall enjoyability, I think How To Raise The Wind should be awarded fot the way it demonstrates how artificial and flimsy are the musical boundaries that we think are real. Sarah-Jane and Juhani, bless them, have their musical doors all open and you only have to follow them.
https://sarah-janesummers.bandcamp.com/album/how-to-raise-the-wind
FolkNotes 