When the Danish band Phønix
(pronounced, roughly, “FooER-nicks”) takes the stage at Milestones next week,
it will be the second Scandinavian group to play Rochester in a year.
Yggdrasil, whose members hail from Norway and the Faroe Islands, was featured
at last summer’s Rochester International Jazz Festival. But while that
incarnation of Yggdrasil (there have been many others) came across as some sort
of erudite progressive rock band, freely deploying jazz, classical, and folk
devices, Phønix is definitely a folk ensemble, albeit with crossover
flourishes.
Like
the Scottish traditional band Old Blind Dogs, a Rochester favorite, Phønix
propels its folk music with hand percussion that drives folk hardliners to
distraction. The band was together for five years and had issued two albums of
traditional Danish dance music before they added a percussionist and began to
incorporate their own compositions into their repertoire. Jesper Falch, the
current percussionist, has been with the band since 1997.
Anja
Mikkelsen, who plays, rather improbably, the bass clarinet, and Jesper Vinther,
a piano accordionist, are the two remaining founders from its origin in 1995.
The bass clarinet supplies both the low-end rhythm, often provided by the
cittern or the mandola in Celtic bands. Vinther’s accordion is the primary
melodic instrument in the band. His playing creates a variety of moods — a
cabaret feel, a percussive underpinning, and a surprising fiddle-like
sprightliness — depending on the song.
When
asked about the contribution of each instrument to the band’s sound, Phønix
vocalist Karen Mose Nørgaard makes an analogy to a rock band. “Instead of a
drum set we use the percussion. Instead of a guitar to do the harmonies and the
melodic rhythmics, we use the accordion, and instead of the bass we have the
bass clarinet.”
Nørgaard
feels that Danish folk has something in common with funk and other groove-based
music. “The bass clarinet fills out the role of a groove bass. In Denmark it’s
called ‘ostinat’. I don’t know if it’s the same in the US, but it means a
little phrase played over and over again.”
It
is actually against the odds that the first Nordic traditional band to
perform in Rochester should be from Denmark. According to Nørgaard, the Danish
folk music scene was virtually nonexistent for several decades until there was
a revival in the 1970s.
“For
many years the main purpose of the music was the social part,” she says. “It
still is, but in the last ten years there has been a greater focus on the music
as ‘concert music.’ The reason, I think, is that the new generation, the
children of the folk musicians of the ’70s, has another way of looking at this
music.”
Unlike
the other Nordic countries, where the folk tradition has never faltered, in
Denmark “there are not many of the traditional musicians left — meaning the
ones who learned all their stuff from their family,” Nørgaard says. “The
younger generation doesn’t have the same relationship to the music because it
is secondhand. But that just calls for another kind of creativity. We can do
with the music what we want. We have to invent it all again to find a meaning
that works for us.”
Phønix’s
new album Pigen & Drengen (“The Boy & The Girl“), is its first
album to include vocals, supplied by conservatory-trained Nørgaard. Indeed, all
but four of the songs have lyrics. They are largely drawn from a compilation
called Old Popular Ballads of Denmark with music either arranged or composed by the band members. The stories in
these ballads, which may be 600 years old, can be found in traditions
throughout Europe.
The
lyrics are nothing like the sentimental prattle that bogs down much of what is
now called “folk music.” Example: A groom fails to show up for his wedding
because he doesn’t think it is worth going out in bad weather that day (“Tyge
Hermansen”). A dead queen is magically brought to life by the mourning of her
bereaved husband only to complain about having her eternal rest disturbed
(“Dronning Dagmar”). A knight responds to the wooing of a beautiful woman by
cutting off her head because he knows that she is really a hideous mountain
troll (“Mangelus”).
But
where does Phønix fit in with the sprawling Scandinavian traditional music
scene? To some extent Phønix resembles Finnish bands like JPP and Troka, in
that they are university-trained and play instruments that have been borrowed
from other European traditions, like the violin, accordion, and clarinet. But
while the Finnish sound often falls somewhere between Baroque and jazz, Phønix
never sounds stuffy.
Some of the Swedish trad bands, such
as Hedningarna, bring an aggressive attack associated with electric rock music
to entirely acoustic arrangements. Wildly popular in their native Sweden, their
heresy may have allowed other Swedish trad bands like Groupa, Hoven Droven,
Harv, and Våsen to play with similar headlong intensity. Phønix
occasionally approaches this sort of interpretation, but their music always
swings more than that of their Swedish counterparts.
On
their album Hildegard von Bingen,
Garmarna, another Swedish band, re-imagined the music of the eponymous medieval
nun as electronica. All of the albums of the Danish band Sorten Muld (Black
Earth) combine programmed beats and keyboards with traditional bagpipes (saekkepibe) and keyed fiddles (nyckelharpa). In contrast, Phønix is an
entirely acoustic band and is making no attempt to win over the
Ecstasy-and-black-lipstick set.
The
first two Phønix albums were entirely comprised of traditional dance music.
Unlike the ancient and universal nature of the ballads, the dance tunes vary
more among the Nordic cultures. While the polksa
is the single most popular dance in Sweden, in Denmark the hopsa and schottische are also popular. Nørgaard asserts that “the Swedish
and the Danish dances have a different character, and, of course, the music as
well. In short you can say that the Danish music is more major [key] music and
the Swedish is more minor [key] music.”
In Rochester we are perhaps most
familiar with the dance music of Ireland and Scotland. When asked if a Celtic
music fan would find anything familiar in Danish dance music, Nørgaard
admitted, “the [Danish] music of the 17th century is very similar to the Celtic
music. We have a lot of jigs and reels like in Scotland and Ireland, but the
17th-century dancing is not really known today. So the music hasn’t been played
for many years. But there has been a growing interest over the last five
years.”
Phønix will appear Wednesday, January 14, at Milestones, 170 East Avenue, at 7 p.m.
Tix: $10. 325-6490
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2004.
