Beginnings…
Hello and welcome to a new section of my blog! For those of you who have been reading my posts for awhile this is going to be a new topic, with the eventual aim of it becoming a book somewhere down the line. For those of you who may have landed here from a search or from another site, welcome to my music and photography blog! I hope you will have a look around at some of my other posts.
I’m not quite sure who it was in Celtic music circles who first stumbled on the joys of Scandinavian folk music several years ago. Being an aficionado of that music I soon noticed that alongside the more typical sets of jigs and reels soon came lots of polskas and waltzes originating from Scandinavia. And why not? The traditional music originating from the Scandinavian countries is similar in structure and tone to Celtic music. Eventually this led me to exploring the music from those countries specifically. Though there are some wonderful vocal groups and singers like Garmarna and Mari Boine, I became especially interested in the more instrumental heavy bands like Vasen, Harv, and Frigg. The tunes are by equal measure jaunty and atmospheric and the feel of that more isolated northern landscape comes across in them. I have not been to any of those countries yet myself, but one of the things I love about music is that it can capture the landscape and ‘feel’ of a place, even if you have never been there.
Gradually, as I started listening to more of the music, I felt there was something else familiar to me on some of the instrumental tunes. For some reason I could never quite place my finger on, certain tunes felt like something akin to American western music. As in lonesome prairies, and cowboys kind of western music. The kind of music that eventually became known as Country & Western or Western Swing, before the ‘western’ got dropped both in style and name eventually. Continue reading “The Scandinavian Cowboy”
Soundtrack Of A Photograph 