root salad Tautumeitas
Harmonies, they got ’em. Chris Nickson talks to six women from Latvia. It’s a tough job, but…
Soviet Union. But in the last few years we’ve heard some wonderful, inventive folk music from Estonia, and now the Lat- vian voices are rising – quite literally in the case of Tautumeitas (pronounced Tautu- MAY-tas). First the six women in the band collaborated on a CD with drum-and-bag- pipe group Auli, and now they’ve made a properly impressive debut with their own self-titled album – you can hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 71 compilation.
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The songs all come from the tradition, the harmonies are immersed in the past, but careful touches of synth and brass add to the older instruments and voices to give everything a new frame. As the cover states, “the closer they got to the songs, the closer the songs got to them.”
“We’ve seen many projects where peo- ple try to make folk songs contemporary with rock or funk or jazz,” explains singer and vio- linist Lauma Berza. “What we try to do is explore the song itself. We’ve been involved in folklore all our lives and we love it. We’re not taking it just for material or a theme.”
That passion shines through every track, and highlights the Latvian polyphonic singing tradition.
“Multi-part singing has a rich history here,” Berza says. “It’s usually women, but sometimes men join in. The tradition is a capella, going back to medieval times.”
What’s happening now isn’t the first folk revival in the country. One arose the late ’70s, giving a sense of national identity and resistance again the Soviets; “authen- ticity” was the watchword. But today’s music comes after twenty years of real inde- pendence and freedom in the air. Tua- tumeitas were born into that. The band came together when some of the members were studying together at the academy.
“We can’t really put a start date on it,” Berza laughs. “About three years. For our dissertation we did a presentation based on a local tradition from Eastern Latvia and sang Aulejas Klezmer (which became the last track on their CD with Auli, and confus- ingly has nothing to do with klezmer music as we know it). After that we kept singing together, added instruments and decided to make the music more accessible to people outside folk music.”
For Berza, it was the sound of the bag- pipes and traditional instruments that first kindled her love of folk music. “They play
aybe it’s something in the Baltic waters. Or perhaps it’s a generation coming of age after independence from the
simple things that sound incredible, so differ- ent from what we’re taught in music schools. Just three notes can be awesome. It’s the story of our blood, our common story.”
The first Tautumeitas recording hap- pened almost by accident. They’d been hired for an educational project, along with Auli. “It was three shows a day in a hall,” Berza recalls. “Student groups came and went. The programmer suggested the bands should do one song together, and we settled on Aulejas Klezmer. Auli liked it and wanted to do more with us. They had a stu- dio, and we thought why not? That first song we did was about an unfortunate mar- riage, so an album about weddings seemed natural – and we have many wedding songs here. We made Lai Masina Rotajas. It was a great milestone for us, and won Best Folk Album in Latvia.”
The two bands performed together all over Latvia, and in autumn 2017 did live TV performances every week. It helped make them both well-known in their homeland, and left Tautumeitas eager to record their own album.
“We met Reinis Sejans, a great produc-
er. He had a duo, and we decided to work with him. The Intro piece on the CD was something he originally did for a TV series on Latvian history. We’re proud that our voices are on the soundtrack, so people con- nect us with the history.”
Choosing the material for the album
came easily, Berza says, because “we shared some common songs. Each of us will bring
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songs, although sometimes we have to add to them. So far we haven’t really had to search, although there is a good archive.”
What they’ve created on Tuatumeitas is
utterly different to the collaboration with Auli. It’s something that hews close to the tradition, that keeps the six voices, with their harmony and swooping polyphony, absolutely at the heart of things, yet at the same time draws on everything else that’s influenced the women and their producer. It’s faithful to the past, but it’s also faithful to the present. The mix is often subtle, at times overwhelmingly beautiful, at others raw and daringly stark. They make the sim- ple melodies vibrant and alive for our times.
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018 saw Tautumeitas busy with festi- vals and events, as well as headlining a pair of solo concerts in Riga, which is home to half the country’s two mil- lion population. A second show was added after the first sold out.
“In 2019 we want to perform outside Latvia,” Berza says, “as well as headline more gigs here, and play all three of the big concert halls in the country. During the sum- mer we’ll play festivals, and in 2020 we have dates lined up in Germany.”
They’ve let everything grow naturally, becoming known at home, and they’ve ploughed their furrow and done what feels right. At the moment, they’re at the fore- front of the new Latvian folk surge, and set- ting a very high bar for all those who fol- low. The next few years are going to be very interesting.
www.tautumeitas.lv F
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