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Kyösti Järvelä& Juho Puronaho of Tötterssön T


his year, in a festival sensibly reduced from nine to seven days, while there was still a healthy seasoning of foreign guests including Ivo Papasov’s Bulgarian wedding band, it was local music, musicians, bands, dancing and special shows that were not only the heart but the high points, with a wide variety of music in small and big events, and musicians and audience mingling across the entire age range.


The numbers attending are substantial, but the scale of interac- tion between people, and between performers and audience is inti- mate; the music is made with, rather than at. From morning into the still-daylight early hours one could hear the familiar sound of almost orchestral Kaustinen pelimanni music across the site, and see cou- ples and ensembles dancing to it. No aural pollution; peaceful and relaxing in very hot sunny weather punctuated only by a couple of brief dramatic thunderstorms.


A defining moment was one of the local hero bands Töt- terssön, a dynamic, witty, thrash fiddle-guitar-harmonium-bass combo fronted by Kyösti Järvelä’s blood-vessel-bursting, manic Suggs-like vocal, unbooked this year but doing a mighty impromp- tu guerrilla gig in the outdoor bar beside Pelimannitalo at 1.30 am.


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Tötterssön shares some personnel with other local bands Frigg, Snekka and JPP. JPP played for the arena’s massed midnight quadrille, a continuous linked-series dance of couples and chains to many tunes that goes on for a dancer-exhausting hour, but also with particular delight a busking performance beside the rubbish bins outside the festival’s cafeteria. Frigg’s exuberant, multi-fiddle gigs were as rich with brilliantly-played new melodies as ever, and Snekka, a more rocky affair fronted by fiddles, accordeon and electric guitar that in the past hadn’t really touched me, were transformed in a storming, Vari-Lite-enhanced midnight arena gig that would get Glastonbury ovations, combining Kaustinen’s music, skill and wit with a rock presence and theatrical quirks.


t isn’t all fiddles. The local kantele tradition, while not bur- geoning like its fiddle music, continues in the hands of some surviving older players and newer movers, particularly Hannu Saha, a leading kantele player and expert in the region’s style. He moved to Kaustinen in the early days of the Folk Music Institute as its Director, then became Director of the Folk Arts Centre, was chairman of Finland’s arts council (yes, a folk musician; imagine Martin Carthy being chairman of Arts Council England!) and is now Professor of the folk music depart- ment at Sibelius Academy in Helsinki while still with his home in Kaustinen. From a line of Kaustinen kantele players going back to the days of the 19th century’s nationally celebrated kantele diva Kreeta Haapasalo, Sibelius Academy graduate Sanna Huntus teaches a new generation of players down south including Espoo group Kardemimmit.


Accordeons too. Be it the big button-key chromatics or smaller push-pull diatonics, across Finland accordeon playing has over the last decade or so taken big strides in technique and adventurousness, in the hands of folk-music-rooted players from other parts of Finland, such as Maria Kalaniemi, Johanna Juhola, Kimmo Pohjonen, Markku Lepistö and, from Kaustinen’s nearest larger town Kokkola, Antti Paalanen.


Hearing Kaustinen’s Terhi Puronaho play her own composi- tions on 1 and 2½-row diatonics accompanied by JPP composer and harmonium-driver Timo Alakotila on piano and her brother Juho, of Tötterssön, on violin, music of gorgeous finesse and sub-


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