Background and context
My fondest musical memories from childhood was listening to my mum play the piano from the sheet music of Jan Johanssons ‘jazz på svenska’. Her versions became so ingrained in my ears that the first times I heard the original recording, I thought it was a cheap imitation.
Although with this project I have in some sense ended up where I started again (with folk music being played on keyboard instruments), I have since that time had diverse interest and influences as a musician. I do feel, as improvising saxophonist Evan Parker put it, that: «my roots are in my record player». Although I would probably translate it to to «my roots are in the internet cables»
Double bass is my main instrument and I’ve played (and continue to do so) in jazz, folk and improvised music ensembles. Significant for the background of this project has been: Alasdair Roberts & Völvur, Miman, Marthe Lea Band, Adeln, Skrekk & Guro, Klockrike, Adeln, Camilla Hole Trio etc.
Playing with Guro Kvifte Nesheim and William Soovik, with folk music material as a basis for improvisation, in the trio ‘Klockrike’ was a particularly formative experience
My previous experience of connecting to an instrument (the double bass) to the extent that it almost becomes a direct extension of me, has led me to appreciate how differently one interacts with electronic instruments (even after years of practice), which directly informs this project.
Inspired by Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra and the logistical challenges of touring as a double bass player I started playing electronic instruments in 2016. Important albums and groups as a synthesist, for the inception of this project has been, my previous solo records «Kingdom of Bells - Egil Kalman plays the Synthi 100» and «Forest of Tines - Egil Kalman plays the Buchla 200», which where also (partly) inspired by folk music, but in less direct ways. A duo with with Fredrik Rasten where we work with just intonation. And my duo with Zoe Efstathiou where we co-compose and perform abstract electroacoustic music.
So, in many ways this project has its origin in close collaborations with a number of musicians that I’m involved with. And feels like a continuation of these past musical endeavors in that it attempts to combine different parts of these disparate expressions.
Peers
I am also part of a broader community of musicians working with stretching folk music in different ways using electronics today. Among them: Naaljos Ljom, Marcus Price, Maria W Horn & Sara Parkman, Kenneth Lien & Center of the Universe, Erlend Aspneseth Trio, Christian Lappalainen,
Here I want to highlight the duo of Morten Joh and Anders Hana (Naaljos Ljom) for their emphasis on intonation and utilizing just intonation as a tuning system, continuing Eivind Grovens legacy. And for making their studies available for all at the website: skalastudier.no. I’ve been fortunate to be in correspondence with them about these topics via email and in person when I was invited to play at their concert series ‘gorrlaus’ in Stavanger.
Important inspirations
For me Dariush Dolat Shahis album ‘electronic music tar and sehtar’ makes a compelling case for a fusing of electronic and folk music. It’s interesting to me that he felt that the electronic equipment enabled him to express himself in what he calls this ‘expressionist style’:
"Back in 1981, after I graduated from Columbia, I composed a series of works for tar, setar and electronics. While the instrumental pieces that I did at that point remained in line with the abstract, serial Columbia style, the electronic music equipment allowed me to express another part of myself. Working mostly on my own, I became involved in a more expressionist style. I let it out."
Another important innovator is Laurie Spiegel who uses material from her background as a folk musician as a basis for her generative and algorithmic computer music, in pieces such as ‘appalachian groove’
She also sees other links between folk music and electronic music:
"But the electronic model is very similar to the folk model. You have material that floats around and is transmitted from person to person. It’s in variable form; it’s constantly being transformed and modified to be useful to whoever is working with it, the same way folk songs are. People will come up with new lyrics for the same melody, or they’ll change it from a ballad to a dance piece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. There’s no owner. The concept of ownership doesn’t come in. In the way that electronic sounds go around—people sample things, they do remixes or sampling, they borrow snatches of sound from each other’s pieces—the concept of a finite fixed-form piece with an identifiable creator that is property and a medium of exchange or the embodiment of economic value really disappears in both folk music and electronic and computer music in similar ways."
Henry Flynts ‘Hillbilly tape music’ is another record that shows exemplary ways of applying techniques from electronic and minimal to folk music material. I also share his inspiration of La Monte Young:
"La Monte’s example showed me that a departure from ethnic music could take a direction different from the quasi-atonal direction that was surfacing in jazz with Coltrane’s “Ascension” and Coleman’s Free Jazz. The expanded role which Young gave to riffing, in jazz that was tonal, almost modal, was highly important to me. Young’s well-known, but unpublished, saxophone playing in the Sixties made jazz entirely modal while opening it to “eternal” melodic exploration."
Speaking of composers that utilize just intonation; Eivind Groven and his homemade, electronically tuned organ, forms a strong connection to this project. Both for his interpretation of folk music with a keyboard instrument and (for) his framework for analyzing and playing folk music using just intonation. His metaphor of intonation in music resonates with me, as he said it:
"Eg har alltid sammenlignet det med ett landskap som man ser genom en glasrute. La oss si att musikken svarer till landskapet och att glasruta svarer till tempereringen. Hvis den er skiten då blir landskapet uklart och hvis vi vasker glasruta blir landskapet klarere. Landskapet er detsamme i begge tillfellen og slike er det också med musikken, den er densamme. Men den blir ikke så klar, den blir grumsete, på grund av svevninger som uppstår på grund av urenheten."
Here I also want to mention my supervisor Bjørn Ole Rasch’s synthesizer playing with Annbjørg Lien, Hallvard Bjørgum and Kirsten Bråten Bergh specifically as an inspiration and reference for combining electronic keyboard instruments with players of acoustic instruments.
Artistic research context
The following works in artistic research has been of particular relevance for my project, both on an academic as well as on an artistic level.
In the field of artistic research Mattis Kleppens project where he synthesized a personal playing style on the bass guitar using elements from three different folk music traditions: Fiddle tunes from Telemark Norway, traditional music from Mali and Senegal and blues music from USA.
Ingfrid Breie Nyhus for her own highly personal interpretation of folk music on piano.
The project ‘ferd - music without borders’ initiated by Bjørn Ole Rasch and Ingolv Haaland at UiA has also been an inspiration in creating meeting points between different musics.
Per Anders Nilssons PhD project ‘A field of possibilities - designing and playing digital instruments’ for his reflections around playing with instruments which uses player defined mappings.
(More to be added)
Wider context and inspirations
Taking a broader view, there are plenty of artists than can be named, working on the edges of different folk musics, whose approaches greatly informsthis project. To mention a few that I consider especially relevant as points of reference: Anne Hytta, Stephan Meidell, Christian Lappalainen, Anders Røine, Edward Grieg… (more to be added here)
One of the most important among them for me is Don Cherry who had this to say about the music he played:
"Well for one thing, it is not my music, because it’s a combination of different experiences, different cultures and different composers, that involves the music that we play together."
"The first thing I would say is that it’s not my music. You’ll run into different circumstances where musicians will say ‘I have my music, you have your music, he has his music’ But I mean, everything is so impermanent, how can you cling to something, life itself is not permanent."