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proclamations add weight to the feeling of paying homage to the ancestral music flow- ing through their veins. A really lovely pro- ject. You can hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 44 compilation.
The solo release from Baba continues the theme, but with a more conventional con- temporary Malian studio line-up of drums, bass and drums. Interesting textures, deep rootsiness and well executed.
www.babasissoko.com Sarah Coxson
MAARJA NUUT Soolo Sluchaj Uchem 4743154000200
When, six years ago, I first met Maarja Nuut, a then 21-year- old violinist already with considerable achievement as a classical soloist, who was soon to set off on what turned out to be an alarming trip on her own to learn from an Indian violinist, she was studying traditional Estonian village music in Viljandi. Her quiet, unshowy command as a player and improvis- er marked her out as special. As I wrote in reviewing Viljandi festival 2007 for fRoots 295/296, her singing and playing of an Esto- nian regilaul with Chilean Nano Stern and Finn Antti Järvelä was for me a defining moment of the event.
Since then, deeply immersed in the old ways of playing and carrying them forward she has indeed been creating her own path. While very well able to play with and adapt to musicians and styles from across the world, including as a leader at Ethno camps and a member of the Ethno In Transit touring group, and with other Estonian musicians in the trio Knihv, the music she makes solo is boldly, quietly, determinedly individual.
Soolo’s opening, Soend, consists of just violin bowed and looped continuously with- out changing pitch, the movement coming from the shifting interplay of the strings’ high harmonics, blending gradually with wordless voice. The following two tracks, Torupilliviis and Sabatants, are Estonian-bag- pipe (torupill)-derived hypnotic patterns over drones, with again her voice making a second instrument. Then a song, accompanied by plucked fiddle patterns, about a bride-to-be who thought she was unwanted and “hid herself where the wild roses grow”.
The Rheingans Sisters
It flows on, time-suspended, a reverie; grainy violin, wordless vocalising, speaking, whispering, rustlings, traditional dance tunes played with deep-driven bow, songs of lovers and separation. Maarja has been absorbing the spirit of village tunes and songs and of the people who’ve played and sung them, finding material and approaching it in ways unlike anyone else in Estonia.
With just her fiddle and voice, subtly
self-looped (with just a touch of guest bowed double bass underpinning the har- monising vocal wave-motion of the final track, Veere, Veere Päevakene – Roll, Roll Along, Oh Day), Soolo might be described as minimalist, but there’s a warmth and completeness to it, a feeling of being sung and played to in a quiet wooden house among the wide skies, marshes, silver-birch and dark pine forests of the Estonian coun- tryside, and, as on a walk in a favourite spe- cial place, each time round brings a new perception.
www.maarjanuut.com Andrew Cronshaw
THE RHEINGANS SISTERS Glad Gold Hearts RootBeat RBRCD17
Here’s an unexpected little gem. Rowan Rheingans – she of Lady Maisery – teams up with sister Anna
on a positively forthright and bold collection of songs and tunes recorded live by produc- er Andy Bell in such a fashion that they appear to sitting next to you on the sofa playing and singing. The scrapes of their fid- dles are right in your face and the soul of the music almost palpable.
At times they sound like a couple of old-time country musicians sitting on a porch in the Deep South, though their terms of reference are far broader than that as they mine tunes from Norway and Swe- den, where they both studied folk music; one of the most intriguing tracks is the clos- er Reiselått Frå Nes, a slightly weird tradi- tional Hardangar fiddle tune which evolves with arresting mystery into a ghostly cho- rus. Bookended with an opening version of the old warhorse Sorry The Day I Was Mar- ried, inventively set to raucous Estonian rhythms, it’s indicative of exploring minds and an obvious passion for playing.
Photo: Elly Lucas
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