Knut
In 1976
I had a job in a record store in St. Paul. One of my co-workers was a guy named
Morrey Nellis. He married a Norwegian woman and became director of intramural
athletics at Macalaster College where I used to go for a run every now and then.
In 1990 or '91 he gave me a tape of Hardingfele music saying, "Listen to
this." He got it from his wife who was director of the Hardingfele Society
of America.
A Hardingfele is a Norwegian fiddle that has sympathetic (drone) strings under
the fingerboard. It has a rich and resonant tone. A huge sound. They are beautiful
instruments, decorated with pearl inlay, rosette patterns and other sorts of
filigrees. Besides having a beautiful sound, the Hardingfele (or "Hardangar
fiddle") has a lore and mythology all its own. The fiddlers and their instruments
were sometimes thought to be in league with certain spirits, or even Satan himself,
or Satan herself.
It was thought that, in order to play his (or her) best, a fiddler must make
a pilgrimage on a moonlit night to certain waterfalls and throw in a leg of
mutton to invite the spirit of the waterfall out. The spirit ("fossegrim")
would break the fingers of the fiddler's left hand so he or she could reach
formerly impossible fingerings, and then break the fingers of the fiddler's
right hand so the bow could be held more efficiently. The fiddler would then
be beholden to the spirit and begin his career of roaming the countryside and
playing. A good fiddler was said to be able to play in such a way that a glass
of whiskey would dance across a table and up the fiddler's arm. The Lutheran
church took a dim view of these legends and encouraged mass smashings and burnings
of these instruments.
I took the cassette that Morrey gave me back to my studio and, after it started,
had to sit down and listen to it. It was good. The cassette had little in the
way of information. It was all in Norwegian. I did figure out that the fiddler
was a man named Vidar Lande.
In'93 or'94 I went to a concert by the Finnish band "Vartinna." I
bought a CD at the show and the guy selling me the CD looked at my check and
recognized my name from my ECM releases. He said he had a record shop in Helsinki.
I asked him if he knew where I could find Vidar, and he said he would try to
hunt down his address. About two months later he sent it to me. I took two tunes
I liked from Vidar's cassette, dubbed them up to my 16-track, and added a few
tracks of guitar and gongs around them. Then I sent a tape off to Vidar and
asked him if he'd like to do an album together. He wrote back and said he would.
This was about the time "Chö" (my album with the Tibetan singer Chöying
Drolma) was coming out. I was looking forward to doing a project that seemed
simple. The project with the Tibetan nuns was incredibly complex. There was
a lot of travel involved, and a great deal of conflict with old structures of
power, both institutional and personal. Norway seemed simpler. Norwegians in
Minnesota seem more up front about things. In Asia it's hard to figure out what
people really want, and what the real story behind a situation is. As it turned
out, there was just as much mysticism and intrigue in Norway as there was in
Nepal.
I was heading to Bali to administer a study abroad program, and just before
I left Vidar wrote and said he couldn't do the project. He said he hadn't been
playing music much and had been busy with his duties teaching Kierkegaard at
Oslo University. However, he did recommend a player from Folkedahl named Knut
Hamre. He said Knut had great tone and was easy to work with.
I sent a letter to Knut, and he replied favorably to me at my address in Ubud,
in Bali. I had brought a cassette copy of his CD to Indonesia, and listened
to it a lot. The cyclical nature of the Hardangar fiddle music seemed to mesh
nicely with the gong cycles of Javanese and Balinese music. We were set.
Marc Anderson and I flew to Oslo and caught the train to the western side of
the country. We spent about 10 days recording with Knut and Turid in a small
church in Utne. Every morning we would board a ferry to cross the fjord from
Granvin to Utne. We would run through the tunes together and work on arrangements,
then Turid and Knut would play while we recorded them.
The recording project in Norway was fairly straightforward. Knut plays about
eight to ten hours a day, so this type of recording session was easy for him.
There were moments when his instrument was warmed up, the room felt right, and
he would say, "The song is coming now." And it would.
The distant sounds of the ferry or fishing boats ("fiske boats") sometimes
crept into the recordings. Knut's wife would pack a lunch of lefse, coffee,
and goat cheese for us. At the end of the day we'd get the ferry back home.
On the ferry, or drinking cider waiting for the ferry, we'd talk about the lore
that swirled around the instrument, its players, and the subjects of the songs.
A lot of the songs are about "Huldres," mythical mountain beauties
who come and sing songs to fiddlers asleep under trees. "Underground people,"
Turid called them.
There isn't much that happens in that part of the country, so our recording
project attracted the attention of the national television and ratio stations.
They came to interview us at the end of a long day of recording. They asked
us if we thought the CD would sell. We surprised them by saying, "No."
Hardingfele music is not all that popular in Norway, and I could tell that the
album would edge towards the stranger side of the instrument. On the ferry home
Knut mentioned an old saying, something like, "The only exercise my father
got was leaping across the room to shut off the radio when Hardingfele music
came on."
After the end of the television interview in the church Knut said, "I remember
a song, a song is coming." He unpacked his fiddle, we set the microphones
back up, and everybody sat down and listened while we recorded him. It was magic.
Knut seemed to invoke something. Huldres, maybe. The wood grain in the walls
started to crawl. Marc wrote these notes on the tape box: "With everyone
around, T.V., radio museum. Fiske boats and evening traffic throbbing about.
We sat in rapt attention. Chocolate and caffeine hardly noticeable this late
in the day. Underground people."
Recording notes: I didn't like the sound of the DAT I used to record the nuns
in Nepal, so I brought an analog Nagra reel-to-reel tape deck. I used two Neumann
U-87s with the Nagra.
I was looking for advice on microphones from a friend and he said, "I never
heard a good recording of a violin that didn't have a lot of the room in the
sound." I found that to be true with the Hardangfele. I put one microphone
close to Knut, and one about 20 feet away in the church. This worked well, so
we used the same approach with Marc's drums and my guitars. We used very little
EQ or reverb in the mix, and kept the recording chain analog all the way to
the end. I'm not an analog purist, but the medium seemed to suit the music.
I did a lot of gong sampling in Bali. The school I work for there has a Balinese
Gamelan orchestra, and when time permitted I would drag each instrument into
my room and get good samples of it. My room was right on a rice paddy, and I
did most of my sampling at night, so that's why you can hear insect sounds in
some of the samples. It wasn't my intention to be overly pastoral, though the
bugs twittering and frogs croaking seems to fit in some places.