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of the body, unshowy and economical. “If you go to a village dance nowadays there may be a horrible one-man synth-sequencer band, but if you look at the old people, how they move – there’s so much to see and notice, and people don’t know it.”
Other countries, though, have still- living traditions with much in common. “When you work with recordings there are so many questions, such as ‘Why does he do that? Maybe it’s a mistake, or he just doesn’t know how to play’. But when I go to Poland and see an old guy playing in front of my eyes I have all the answers!”
She began to work with Norwegian dancer and researcher Ami Petersson Dregelid. In Poland the Janusz Prusinowski Trio have been the main motivators and inspirers of an upsurge in the playing and dancing of the old-style traditional mazureks. There was a coming-together of people exploring in the same directions and seeing connections, which has developed, under the auspices of the Estonian Traditional Music Centre August Pulst School into the DanceLab project, initiated in September 2012 by Maarja, Ami, Swedish fiddler Ellika Frisell and Piotr Zgorzelski, dancer and bass player of the Prusinowski Trio, and as it rolls on with its research, workshops and teaching it’s drawing in Janusz and others.
Meanwhile Maarja has been evolving as an artist. There’s been the aforementioned Ethno In Transit, the trio Knihv with fel- low-fiddler Karoliina Kreintaal and percussionist Tõnu Tubli play- ing Estonian fiddle tunes, and now her solo album, Soolo.
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It wasn’t planned to be quite so completely solo. She couldn’t get started on it Estonia and so went to Poznan in Poland to record it. “I had one musician from Estonia who isn’t a folk musi- cian, he’s a guitarist and creator of soundscapes. I wanted to have a bit with him and also a bit with Janusz. But in the end the timetable collapsed, and I was sick and had just two days alone in the studio just with the engineer Michal Garstecki. He didn’t speak a word of English, but we talked with pictures and it worked out quite nice in the end.”
he overall feel of the CD is so focused and minimal that, to her surprise, it’s gaining a lot of interest from people well outside the folk music circle, and much of its audience is probably unaware which of its tunes or songs are traditional and which are Nuut originals, often made up in the studio. “If you’re playing a traditional tune you have a framework and a language, but how you say it changes on the spot.” She finds it hard to listen to herself, “Because it’s so personal; I was singing in the middle of the night, just try-out versions. But in the end it was the emotion, and Michal just forced me to keep them. All of them are first takes.”
For her, music is a very visual and physical thing. “When I play these traditional tunes on the record they are like I would dance. And for me it’s very important how the musician moves the body; it influences the way you play. And the dancer is also like an instrument.”
Now, the record done, she’s developing ideas for future live solo performances which might well involve a lighting designer and creative sound engineering. Even without these (and she’s aware of the risk of clutter and distraction – if she does it she’ll do it right), such is her intense focus – just her, her violin and some subtle looping – that her performance on a recent Estonian TV arts show, to be found up on YouTube, can be seen to first nonplus then convert the round-table pundits.
The album is far from the sort of ‘set of fiddle tunes’ approach. “I’m not fixated on playing authentic music; I’m more interested in human communication. I think people are starting to miss it these days; our experiences are so virtual. I think the under- lying mission of my music would be that I still think there are good things about community and interaction. Even physical objects are becoming virtual; now my album is available as a download, but I would really like to give people the physical thing in its package, so they can touch the texture.”
We talk about the harsh realities of present-day marketing. While she uses Facebook and has a website, and recognises that if you want to reach people with music or an idea they’re no longer in the next house in the village so you have to reach out to them using today’s communication technology, she’s disturbed by the way in which students are now being taught how to write blurb about themselves to bring out how special they are, without hav- ing had time to develop and actually become special.
“In order to find a personal way I think it takes a long time of digging, and nowadays young people are used to getting every- thing really fast and really simple. And this desperate need for quick originality can mean that people forget to acknowledge what has been before them. Tradition is based on a process that you take something, you carry it on, you put something of yourself into it, and you pass it on.”
www.maarjanuut.com F
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