root salad Summers & Silvola
Their mix of Scottish trad fiddle and Norwegian guitar is ‘radge’. Tim Chipping translates.
I
t starts with the strum of a beautiful- ly resonant guitar, before an almost wary plucked melody dances around sensuous single notes on the violin. The opening track on Sarah-Jane Summers & Juhani Silvola’s new album Widdershins is a soundtrack to something we can’t see. It’s Bergman’s Smiles Of A Summer Night in miniature; intrigue and romance and stir- rings in the not quite dark.
“The title means ‘the heart of the night’”, explains Sarah-Jane. “In English we have only a negative name for that time of the day: ‘the dead of the night’, which sounds so fearful. Whereas the heart of the night makes it feel like you’re being held and it’s safe and you’re protected.”
Sydänyö was composed by Juhani, the guitar part of the partnership. It’s followed on this dazzling album by one of Sarah- Jane’s tunes, A’ Cheapach Na Fasach.
“Its total rock ’n’ roll,” Juhani enthuses. “Sarah-Jane plays an electric guitar shred- ding solo except there is no electricity involved; it’s acoustic fiddle. I don’t have a fuzzbox that sounds that cool.”
“Those two are the radgest tunes on the album (that’s a Glaswegian word). They’re the edgiest and the most daring.”
Which isn’t to suggest this second release by the Scottish/Finnish duo settles down for some middle-of-the-road trad at any point. This is traditional music from out there. “We don’t think of it as ‘out there’, laughs Sarah-Jane. “We just think of it as ‘we love this’, it just feels natural.”
“The musical ingredients are pretty much all over the place,” says Juhani. “I start- ed out playing extreme black and death metal. Then I played classical music and stud- ied jazz at the Academy of Music in Norway. Then I started playing bluegrass and impro- vised music, contemporary music and ended up with Norwegian trad then Scottish trad via Sarah-Jane. And electronic music and noise... Even if we don’t play electronic music I’m very much influenced by minimal techno even if it’s not obvious from the playing.”
“I was obviously brought up in a tradi- tional music background,” adds Sarah, who also plays with fiddle quartet RANT. “I learned from Donald Riddell who learned from a relative of mine called Alexander Grant of Battangorm. So there was this deep connection instantly to the music, and that I was continuing the legacy. I’m not so much interested in the light jigs and reels but more into the edges of strathspeys. I always think of them as a juxtaposition of light and dark and intensity and release. So
in a way we’re talking about the same ele- ments as Juhani is talking about in metal – looking for these juxtapositions.
“I think we both feel that we work with sound, and I don’t want to be limited by my instrument or my technical abilities or tradi- tion. The fiddle is one of the most incredi- ble, flexible instruments in existence. The possibilities are endless. It’s amazing how it can reflect your inner soul. There’s so much tension going through the strings that if you have a slight thought interrupting your bow stroke it’s magnified through the instrument. So we embrace that, to allow the instrument to recognise and magnify those thoughts. Musically I want to try and break down the boundaries within my own playing. Just dare.”
“There are two ways you can say there’s no boundaries,” thinks Juhani. “You can say it in this kind of hippy way, like ‘just do whatever, dude’. But that’s not really it. The point is that you have to do some work to transcend these boundaries. You can’t just fake it; you have to take it seriously. There are boundaries and they are to be crossed. But it takes some effort to climb a mountain.”
The album’s accompanying press release describes the couple as sharing
“telepathic interplay”. That’s a bold claim. “It’s definitely more telepathic now than when we first started playing,” says Juhani, giving hope to anyone not yet feeling that connection with their other half. “It is of course because we’re married but also playing together so much. Now we rarely count up the tunes, we just start! There are many things where we don’t have to say ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, we just go the same way. Or we can hear where the other one is going and we rarely have to talk about it.”
married. I think the two are intrinsically linked. Playing music has definitely made the marriage stronger too. Seriously! Every marriage goes through its phases and we’ve always known that we communicate really well musically so we can always say, ‘let’s just go play some music!’”
“F Couples that play together stay togeth-
er. (fRoots cannot be held legally responsi- ble for the breakup of any folk relationship that follows this advice.)
www.sarahjanejuhani.com F
or me it comes from trust,” says Sarah-Jane. “And that trust comes from years of working together and being
21 f
Photo: Johannes Selvaag
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