Festival of American Fiddle Tunes/Paul Conklin

 

Spring 2003

ARTICLES

COLUMNS

  • Fiddle Tune History, The Black Joke, by Andrew Kuntz
  • The Practicing Fiddler: My Glamorous Life: A Professional's Practice Routine, by Hollis Taylor
  • Bluegrass Fiddling -- Keeping the Tradition: California's Fiddlin' Ed Neff, by Paul Shelasky
  • On Improvisation: Improvising in a Specific Style, by Paul Anastasio
  • Cross-Tuning Workshop, Part 20: AEAE/GDGD, by Jody Stecher
  • Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: Manitoba's Reg Bouvette, by Gordon Stobbe
  • Reviews of Recordings & Books
  • In Memoriam: Gene Goforth, "Tex" Grimsley, Bob Crump

TUNES

  • Splendid Isolation, by Brendan McGlinchey, transcribed by Brendan Taaffe
  • The Map on the Wall, by Brendan McGlinchey, transcribed by Brendan Taaffe
  • Hora, transcribed by Peter Anick as played by Anghel Gheorghe "Caliu" of Taraf de Haïdouks
  • Black Joak, from Walsh, Lancashire Jiggs, Hornpipes, Joaks, etc. (c. 1730)
  • Black Jock, from Aird, Vol. II (1782)
  • Black Jock, from Gow, 4th Repository
  • Ice on the Pump Handle, traditional, transcribed by Hollis Taylor (The Practicing Fiddler)
  • Down Among the Budded Roses, transcribed by Paul Shelaskky as played by Ed Neff
  • Wolves A-Howling, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by John Alexander Brown (Cross-Tuning)
  • Wolves A-Howling, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by Charles Stripling (Cross-Tuning)
  • Maytwayasing, waltz by Reg Bouvette and Jim Flett (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)

 

ARTICLE EXCERPTS

Photo: Courtesy Shore Fire Media

Doug Kershaw: The "Real Deal" in Cajun Fiddle

By Michael Simmons

There is little doubt that Doug Kershaw is the most famous Cajun entertainer in the world. His career stretches back more than fifty years and includes stints on the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry. He's shared the stage with country music legends Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, and Roy Acuff, as well as rock stars like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Eric Clapton. He appeared on television as early as 1953, scored his first hit record while he was still a teenager, performed in a movie with shock rocker Alice Cooper, and earned his nickname The Ragin' Cajun with his dynamic stage performances during which he would go through two or three violin bows during the course of one song. He's written dozens of songs, including "Louisiana Man," which has become a Cajun anthem. And all of his success began with the fiddle.

Doug Kershaw was born on January 24, 1936, in Tiel Ridge, Louisiana, a place he says was not a town as such, but was instead a section of coast on a small island where you could tie up your houseboat. His family was poor, but they all played music. His mother Rita played guitar and fiddle, his father Jack played accordion, and his older brothers played as well. "I started on fiddle when I was five years old," he says. "I don't remember taking any lessons, but I did grow up hearing the fiddlers that would stop by to play with my folks, so I just sort of always knew what to do."

In 1945, at the age of nine, Kershaw made his debut as a fiddler on the small bandstand at the gruesomely named Bucket of Blood tavern in Lake Arthur, Louisiana. The place was scary- the stage was protected from flying beer bottles by a chicken wire screen- but his mother Rita was right there with him playing her guitar and ready to step in and help out if he got nervous and forgot the tunes. That night they played a few waltzes and two-steps, and sang some songs in the Cajun French they spoke at home. Not long after his debut, Kershaw was playing regularly with his mother and a local musician named Zenis LaCombe. "We were called the White Shirt Band," he recalls. "Then I formed a band with my older brother Pee Wee and my younger brother Rusty. We called ourselves the Continental Playboys. Pee Wee played accordion, Rusty played guitar, and I played fiddle. But we switched instruments around quite a bit, which is why I can play so many instruments today. I think I can play twenty-nine different ones these days. But fiddle has always been my main instrument from the beginning."

The Continental Playboys played bars and dances around the Lake Arthur area, and eventually they wound up as regulars on radio station KPLC. "We learned songs from local musicians like the fiddler Will Kegley," he recalls. "But when we started playing the bars, we also began to learn the songs off the jukeboxes. We didn't have a radio or record player when I was growing up, so the jukeboxes were really important to me. I would hear Cajun things by Henry Choates, country singers like Ernest Tubb, and big band stuff by Glenn Miller. And I learned to play it all. I still love to play "Stardust." You know, there were no labels on the jukebox-it wasn't country or jazz or Cajun-it was just music."

Doug and Rusty eventually left the Playboys to form a duo. They sang a mix of country and Cajun songs in a sweet, harmonized style that recalled other brother duets like the Louvins and the Delmores. "Sometime around 1953, we met a record producer named J.D. Miller, who recorded blues singers like Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester. I used to play fiddle on some of those records and I talked him into letting us record a song I'd written called "So Lovely Baby." He made a tape and took it up to Nashville to play it for Wesley Rose at Acuff-Rose, who had just started a label called Hickory. Well, they put the tape in the machine, but it got caught inside and tore the tape! And it was our only copy! But I guess they liked the little bit they heard because they signed us." Rusty and Doug re-recorded "So Lovely Baby" in Nashville, and it made it to #14 on the country charts when it was released in 1955.

That same year Rusty and Doug joined the Louisiana Hayride, the popular country music radio show. "The Hayride was really exciting for me," he recalls. "I met Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, and Slim Whitman while I was there." Over the next couple of years Rusty and Doug released more singles, many of them written by the Kershaws themselves, but for the most part they failed to chart. But their dynamic stage shows and radio appearances won them a strong fan base. They also began to add a more rhythmic feel to their music. "We wanted to play rockabilly," Kershaw recalls. "I played fiddle on the early records, but around 1957 we were doing songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant -- they wrote some great songs for the Everly Brothers, you know -- and the fiddle just didn't work as well for that music."

In 1958 they finally hit charts again with the Bryant-penned song "Hey, Sheriff," and later that year they joined the Grand Ole Opry. "When we got to the Opry, the backstage scene was amazing," Kershaw says. "When we started there Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff were the stars, along with people like Marty Robbins. We'd all hang out and pick and play each other the new songs we'd written. Bill Monroe recorded my song "Sally Jo" after hearing it backstage at the Opry. I can't even begin to tell you how it felt back then. Today everything is so competitive. Then we tried to outdo each other on stage, but when we got off, we would pick together. Today it's competitive on-stage and off. I suppose that's the way it has to be, what with the way the music business is these days, but I'm sorry it's like that."

In 1959, Rusty and Doug were both drafted and served two years in the military. In 1961, a few weeks after being discharged, Doug sat down and put some of his memories of growing up around Lake Arthur in a song. Rusty and Doug recorded the autobiographical "Louisiana Man," which made it to #10 on the country charts. "I played the fiddle on "Louisiana Man," which gave it a good Cajun feel," Kershaw recalls. "That led to us recording a few more Cajun songs like "Diggy Diggy Lo" and "Jole Blon," which I think was the first song I ever played on the fiddle." In 1964 Rusty and Doug split up, and they each went their separate ways. Rusty recorded one solo album in 1970, but was never able to duplicate their earlier success. He died of a heart attack in 2001.

Throughout the 1960s, Doug Kershaw worked to get his career as a solo performer going. He made a few records for Mercury and MGM, but they didn't really go anywhere. In 1969 he released The Cajun Way, his first solo album for Warner Brothers. "That album got me an offer to appear on the Johnny Cash Show on television," he recalls. "They gave me a choice: I could play seven shows, and become one of the studio musicians, or I could be on the premier show and have one big solo spot. I decided that I would go for the solo spot. I knew if I was going to be a solo performer I would have to compete with people like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who was also on that show. I gambled and I won. That show introduced me to a whole new audience. I had been a country star in the '50s with my brother Rusty and I had some success in country as a solo performer. I thought I knew what it was like to be a star, but I just had no idea. I went from playing the Opry with Bill Monroe to playing at the Fillmore East with Eric Clapton. And it proved what I always felt, that I could play my music for any audience, not just a country one."

Kershaw dressed in a velvet Edwardian suit and billed himself as the Cajun Hippie. "I was playing rock clubs, colleges, festivals," he says. "I was bringing my music to a whole new audience, and they really loved it." During the early 1970s he played on records by all sorts of musicians, including Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Dylan, and John Stewart. He also got a few minor roles in movies, including "Zachariah," a counterculture western, "Days of Heaven," and the concert film "Medicine Ball Caravan," which was also known as "We Have Come for Your Daughters." Between 1969 and 1978 he released eleven albums on Warner Brothers. His blend of Cajun, country, and rock was popular with his audiences, but his label wasn't really sure how to market him. "They transferred me over to the country division in Nashville when they opened it in the mid-1970s," he says. "I was playing for people in rock clubs and the Nashville people didn't know what to do with me."

Kershaw left Warner Brothers at the end of the 1970s. Over the next few years he made records for a variety of companies and occasionally made the charts, but he never again had a hit as big as "Louisiana Man." But his wild stage shows continued to draw big crowds. He is a powerful fiddler, who can wear out the hair on two or three bows during the course of one song. "I do go through a lot a bows when I play, particularly if I'm using horsehair," he says with a laugh. "I find that synthetic hair is a little more sympathetic to me. Synthetic hair doesn't sound as good, but it does wear better. But sometimes I do like to use horsehair for the show of it, just to see the hair waving around when I play." He will also loosen the bow hair, slip the stick under the fiddle, and use the hair to play on all four strings. "I wanted to play chords on the fiddle when I was a kid," he says. "When I was maybe ten years old I kept filing the top of the bridge down until it was flat, but then I found that although I could play on all four strings, I couldn't play on just one anymore. So I said the heck with this and loosened the bow hair, put the stick under the fiddle, and found I could play them all. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to come up with that, but I was probably the youngest one to do it."

Kershaw is still making records. In 2000 he made Two Step Fever, his first recording of songs in French. "My wife had been after me for twenty-five years to do a Cajun French album," he says. "I have to tell you at first I was kind of leery about doing it, because I didn't want to fall back into the sort of music I played when I first got started. But then I figured at this point in my career I could do what I wanted to. So I went back to Louisiana with some old friends of mine and we just sat down and played. It was just a wonderful feeling to sit and just play that stuff again. I tell you, there's some real life on that album. It really gives people an idea of where I came from. In 2002 I released Easy, a CD that has a more contemporary, honky tonk feel than Two-Step Fever. It's got nine original songs and I'm really happy with the way they came out."

Doug Kershaw has great commercial success, but many aficionados of the traditional forms sniff that he has lost his Cajun soul in the process, that he has more Branson in his playing than bayou. But Michael Doucet, the most respected Cajun fiddler out there, begs to differ. "I've known Doug for twenty years," he says. "Some people dismiss him as just a showman who does a lot of crazy things on stage, but that's not the whole story. Don't forget, he came up the hard way. He was real poor when he was growing up and he played those little bars with the chicken wire around the stages when he was just a kid. The things he sings about in "Louisiana Man" may sound romantic and rural, but that's the story of hard life. You can't fault him for wanting to have more than that. You know, I've played with lots of old-timers and they all have their own rhythm, and when I've played with Doug, he has it, too. It's an amazing amalgamation of notes, melodies and rhythms that you can't fake. He's sixty-five now and he was around when a lot of the great Cajun musicians like Harry Choates, Nathan Abshire and Iry LeJeune were still alive and recording. He knew them and learned from them. He has this commercial side, but he can also play the old songs with a funky, rhythmic drive that's just amazing. He's the real deal."

www.dougkershaw.com

[Michael Simmons, Fiddler Magazine's Review Editor, is a guitar player and writer living in Mountain View, California. He is also co-publisher of The Ukelele Occasional.]

 

Brendan McGlinchey: The Long Road Home

By Brendan Taaffe

I first heard Brendan McGlinchey in 1995, when he had but recently started playing again after a fifteen year hiatus. I was amazed by his technical virtuosity; he seemed in total control of both violin and bow, and he brought an incredible inventiveness to his renditions of standard tunes. McGlinchey is rightly a legendary figure for his dominance of competitions in the fifties and sixties and for his influential and out-of-print recording, Music of a Champion, recorded in 1974 on Finbar Dwyer's Silver Hill label.

Brendan was born in Armagh City, in the north of Ireland, and was encouraged by his mother to take up an instrument. He describes her as "very musical, and full of craic," and she found a teacher for Brendan at the age of twelve. John Conway was a well-known player, but gave up teaching after just nine months. This was to young Brendan's great pleasure. "I was very glad because I never wanted to play the fiddle. Armagh's a tough place, and any male with a fiddle was considered quite effeminate. Also, we were Catholic but lived in a Protestant area of town where Irish music was known as nationalistic, as Fenian music. So my teacher gave up then after nine months and I was very glad. But my mother was quite persistent and in a few weeks she had discovered another music teacher. I had to travel ten miles by bus to a place called Portadown."

This teacher's name was Archibald Collins. Collins was primarily a classical teacher, but had an interest in traditional music. There was another music teacher, Gates, a half mile away, and the two men (Gates a Catholic and Collins a Protestant) would enter their pupils in competitions. Gates had a student who had won a competition in Dungannon twice, and Collins pushed Brendan to learn some tunes and take the cup. He realized he was being used by his teacher, but worked at it. "I practiced it and my mother had a keen ear for what was right and wrong in music, so she'd make sure that I was corrected. I went and won the cup and my photograph was in the paper. This man who had a ceili band, very famous, came looking for me and asked my mother and father permission to take me locally to some of the ceili sessions. That was Malachy Sweeney."

Brendan stayed with the Malachy Sweeney Ceili Band for about a year and a half, and in that time toured around Ireland. The most important thing that happened on these tours was the exposure to all kinds of other players. The community of musicians in Armagh was small, and mostly made up of older people from farming communities. There were house parties and chances to share music, but it was on the early tours that McGlinchey was inspired. "I heard these lovely fiddle players, and became really interested in trying to make myself better."

After that, competitions "seemed to be a natural step." Of competing, Brendan said, " I never liked it. I became very nervous about going to play in the competitions. Most of the other people were the same -- you'd be behind the stage and hardly able to talk to each other. But I recognized that each time I played in a competition I could identify what I did wrong and improve on that for the next time. Then something else would go wrong and you could improve on that as well. So you got a nice balance and it seemed to be character building as well, so then I didn't mind it. The thing I was very disappointed in is that when you were in competitions, afterwards people became very disappointed in not coming first. If you happened to come first, then lots of people wouldn't speak to you for a while."

At eighteen, Brendan went to London, looking for work. "Any sort of work. Being a Catholic in the North you couldn't get much work -- so that was that." Being in London brought the young McGlinchey into contact with the rich stew of other musicians who had emigrated: Bobby Casey, Roger Sherlock, Tommy McCarthy, Joe Ryan, and others. That first stint in London was short and when Brendan returned home he joined the Johnny Pickering Ceili Band. As with Malachy Sweeney, they traveled Ireland playing dances and festivals, and again he was exposed to other players. "All of this improved my playing. The northern style is lots of bow work, ornamentation with the bow, and traveling with Johnny Pickering I heard Paddy Canny's playing. When I heard him I thought it was just amazing that he could do such sweet things with his left hand. So I tried to perfect that, learn what rolls were and cuts and use them in conjunction with the bow work." Going on to define that northern style, Brendan spoke of it as being, "clear and bow-emphasized. It has speed as well, very technical, as opposed to the music that Paddy Canny and Bobby Casey played, which was really slow. Because we were exposed to Scottish music, I think the northern style favored a Scottish style."

One of the hallmarks of Brendan's playing is his penchant for inventive variation. In his hands I've heard tunes like "The Gallowglass" or "The Maid Behind the Bar" take on entirely new life. Of this, Brendan said, "When I went to these farmhouses as a teenager, everybody had to play solo during the course of the evening. It became quite good fun, because they'd like to hear you playing a strange piece of music or a regular piece of music in a strange way. And when we'd all play together, we'd play a tune through maybe four or five times -- just the one tune -- and some clever fellow might go into a run, and that was a challenge to do something different the next time. I find it very difficult in a group of musicians on stage because I can't resist departing from the tunes. I'm very careful to keep the shape of the tune as much as possible. It just seems a natural thing to do; each time I play I'll do it a bit differently."

After that first sojourn to London, Brendan came home and stayed for about two years before going back across, where he's been ever since. Though he initially returned to London, he ended up in the south coast of England where he got a job working in the health service. He continued to play for a while, eventually recording his album, Music of a Champion, for Silver Hill Records in 1974. But his motivation waned and other parts of his life took prominence. "I married and started a family and just didn't take the fiddle out of the case for fifteen years, until 1993. I listened to music, of course. I listened to classical music, to all sorts of music, but I didn't listen to much Irish music and I had lost all of my contacts in Ireland. Sometimes I'd be sitting at my desk at work and a jig would come into my head. I'd use a pencil to finger the tune. There were various people at work who played a bit and someone did ask me to play at a party. I said sure, I'll have a go at it -- but I had no motivation to play. My wife once got me some tickets to hear the Boys of the Lough and I had a tune on Aly Bain's fiddle afterwards, but in the fifteen years I just played those two times."

A small stroke in 1993 prompted Brendan's return to playing. "The doctors told me that if I had a second one that would probably be it. It was quite a shock and suddenly I thought of just three things: my family, Ireland, and my music. So immediately I took my fiddle out of the case and started to play. It was very difficult; I had no coordination and I couldn't think of two tunes to play together. I knew what I wanted to do with the fiddle and so I practiced from July until December. My family was very supportive but I must have driven them crazy because I'd get up at four in the morning and start playing and I'd play straight through then until noon. I'd play one tune the whole time because I couldn't play it properly. With the difference in timing between the two hands, I couldn't get them to work. So I devised a little exercise and decided to just play with the left hand and forget what I was doing with the bow. And if I could perfect that, then I would work on the bow. And I remember distinctly when my fingers started to work well. On December 12th, ten minutes to midnight it all worked so well. My brain telling my hands what to do and everything working in conjunction. I suppose I played like that for about an hour and at ten minutes to midnight I put the fiddle down and ran up the stairs to my wife and said, 'It's worked.'"

...

[Brendan Taaffe is a farmer and musician in central Vermont. He plays fiddle, whistle, and guitar.]

 

Photo: Masataka Ishida

Taraf de Haïdouks: Romania's Musical "Tour de Force"

By Peter Anick

An old fiddler sits under a tree, singing to a young boy about the fall of Ceausescu, Romania's hated dictator. He is playing his violin not with a bow, but with a single strand of horsehair tied to his G string. The sound is brittle and eerie, like the landscape. In the nearby village, musicians are gathering in a field. With a nod from a young violinist in the center of the crowd, the ragtag ensemble of violins, hammered dulcimers, accordions, flute and bass launch like a rocket into a blazingly fast Romanian dance tune.

These are two scenes from Tony Gatlif's 1992 musical documentary, "Latcho Drom," a collage of music and images that traces the route of the Gypsies from India across Europe to Spain. The Romanian segments were filmed in Clejani, a small village southwest of Bucharest near the Bulgarian border. Here, a group of nearly 200 lautari, professional Gypsy musicians, have continued to play traditional music for the village's social events -- its harvests, weddings, christenings and burials -- throughout the long and oppressive regime of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Paradoxically, the isolationist policies of Ceausescu, which prevented modern amenities and modern music from reaching the Romanian countryside, may have inadvertently helped the traditional music survive. Even so, this beautiful and exciting village music might never have traveled beyond the local borders had it not been for two Belgian musicians, Stéphane Karo and Michel Winter. In 1989, they stumbled upon an ethnomusicological recording which fascinated them enough to make the trek to Clejani. So impressed were they with what they heard, they decided to give up their own musical careers to bring this music to the world.

Their plans were delayed by the Romanian revolution, which finally overthrew Ceausescu in December of '89. As soon as things had settled down, they returned and assembled eleven of the finest Clejani musicians into the Taraf de Haïdouks. For the next ten years, this "orchestra of brigands" (as their name roughly translates) toured Europe, winning over audiences wherever they appeared. They performed on TV with Yehudi Menuhin, played the Royal Festival Hall of London with the Kronos Quartet, and composed pieces for the soundtrack of "The Man who Cried," a film by English director Sally Potter. Last January, they won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for the Europe/Middle East category. Sadly, racism still plagues the Gypsies within their own homeland. It was only quite recently that these internationally recognized artists were grudgingly allowed to play a concert in the Romanian capital of Bucharest.

I caught the band in March of 2001 when they came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a show presented by World Music. At that time, the group consisted of nine members and spanned three generations. Representing the older generation were three male singers who regaled the audience with the most ancient style of Romanian music, improvised ballads. Designed to conjure up a state of mind as well as to tell a story, these songs somehow transcended the language barrier. The younger instrumentalists accompanied the singers beautifully, but they really showed their stuff on the dance tunes, played with staggering precision and speed. The rhythm section consisted of slapped bass, accordion, and cimbalom (hammered dulcimer). They created a shimmering backdrop for the flute and fiddles, which wove together complex suites of dance melodies from Romania, Turkey and the Balkans. Within a typical medley, the band started and stopped even the fastest tunes on a dime, switching keys, tempos, and rhythms with an almost unnerving nonchalance. The combination of passion, joy, and sheer virtuosity left most audience members shaking their heads in both delight and disbelief.

It was an equal delight to chat with the two lead violinists before the show's sound check. Anghel Gheorghe "Caliu," born in Clejani, had played violin in the Taraf de Clejani before the revolution and was one of the original members of Taraf de Haïdouks. A natural showman, he is the fiddler seen leading the group in the festive scene in the "Latcho Drom" movie. Costicá Boieru, also a member of the Taraf since the beginning, is both a singer and a violin player, and a bit of a humorist, as I found out during the interview. The group's founder and manager, Michel Winter graciously served as translator.

How far does this music go back?

Michel Winter: The lautari are professional musicians who learn the music from their fathers. It's oral teaching. Each generation is changing. It's changing faster and faster now. A few generations ago, it was changing much more slowly. Still, in the band we have people singing very old ballads and they (Caliu and Costicá) are the accompanists to these people, so they know this old music. They have been learning this music by ear since they were very small kids. The style requires a certain technique. Then each one with his own experience develops his own style.

In your families, does everyone play some instrument?

Anghel Gheorghe "Caliu": Yes. The girls sing. The boys play the violin, cimbalom, contra-bass, guitar.

How does a young child go about picking up the technique?

Michel Winter: They start with the very basic elements of the music of the village where they are. Caliu is teaching his own son now. In the beginning, they start to learn four or five different tunes that have different tonality (key), just to learn the tonality. They are learning everything together at the beginning -- one song in this tonality, one in that, and then they mix it a little bit.

[Caliu illustrates with a hora that starts in A and moves through D and finally into E.]

Michel Winter: He plays it slowly until the student knows exactly the notes, the melody, and then accelerates until they arrive at the right rhythm.

[Caliu demonstrates how he slows down a simple tune to show the notes.]

Michel Winter: I saw him in his house, how he is teaching his children. They are always playing together. He is always behind, playing, playing, playing. And so he starts to play at one moment like his father. And when his son is doing different things, different ornaments, I saw him say, "Oh, nice! You are better than I am!" They encourage them to change. They won't say, "Oh, you have to play it like that. You cannot move!" It's okay, if you want to play it like that.

Costicá Boieru: [joking] In my house, they don't teach anything. We just know immediately how to play.

...

[Peter Anick, co-author of Mel Bay's Old Time Fiddling Across America, plays fiddle and mandolin with the Massachusetts-based "jamgrass" band Acoustic Planet.]

 

Photo: ©Jouko Lehtola

Arto Järvelä: In Time-Honored Finnish Style

By Peter Marten

It is no exaggeration to call Arto Järvelä one of Finland's most prolific folk musicians. He is best known as a founding member of JPP, a prominent fiddle ensemble that celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2002.

However, JPP commitments have not prevented the fourth-generation fiddler from participating in numerous other groups and projects. From 1986 to 1989 he was part of Tallari, the resident group at the Folk Art Center in Kaustinen, Finland, which is home to the annual week-long Kaustinen Folk Music Festival. He has collaborated with Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and Finnish-Americans like fiddler Erik Hokkanen and accordionist Kip Peltoniemi, to name just a few of his musical friendships.

Many friends contributed accompaniment on Järvelä's first solo album, Polska Differente (1994), which displayed his versatility not only as a fiddler, but also as a composer, mandolinist and nyckelharpist. His second solo disc, Arto Järvelä Plays Fiddle (1999), is exactly what the name implies: just him, his fiddle, and over twenty traditional Finnish tunes.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To start with, remember we are in Finland, a country known not only for its fiddlers, but also for its success in a sport that fits its northern climate perfectly: ice hockey.

Tell us about your ice hockey career.

Well, that was short. I lost a quarter of my front teeth. I tried to eat the puck; it was too fast. I was playing just for fun. Then when I was thirteen, I wanted to go to Hämeenlinna [the nearest city] to play for the club there, but my daddy wouldn't let me go. He thought that it was better to play violin than play with the puck, so no NHL career.

What led him to that decision?

Well, it's the family tradition. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all played the traditional music of Kaustinen on the fiddle. I was born in Parola, near Hämeenlinna. But starting when I was four years old I visited my grandparents in Kaustinen every summer. I heard a lot of music there and eventually started to play myself. My grandpa Johannes bought me my first fiddle from the local hardware store in 1969.

Was the fiddle your first instrument?

Not exactly. I started with drums and electric bass when I was about ten, in the family band with my brother Jouni and my daddy Aarne, as well as [future JPP keyboardist] Timo Alakotila and his daddy Toivo. I started to play violin seriously when I was thirteen years old. When I was fifteen, in 1980, I went to the Kaustinen College of Music [actually what North Americans would call a high school] and studied there with my uncle, Mauno Järvelä. That's also where JPP started.

How did JPP begin?

There was a youth club dance company in Kaustinen called Kruusaus, and we [Arto and his second cousins Juha and Jarmo Varila] started to accompany their folk dances. At that time I was playing pump organ and the Varila brothers were fiddling. After two years I was educated enough on the fiddle that I wanted to play it in the band, so we asked Timo Alakotila to come play the harmonium [pump organ] and my brother Jouni became the first JPP bassist. [Fiddles, pump organ and double bass represent a traditional Kaustinen combination.] In 1982 we went to a band competition at a folk festival in Mäntsälä as Järvelän Pikkupelimannit ["the Little Folk Musicians of Järvelä," later to become known by the more pronounceable abbreviation JPP. (By the way, they won the competition.)]. That's when we started so it's twenty years ago.

Your uncle Mauno later became a member of the group. How did he fit into the picture?

Mauno was already sitting in with us sometimes, and the group he was in, Kankaan Pelimannit, disbanded about the same time we started. In 1985 he got a grant from the government to make his own album, and he wanted to do the album with us.

What made JPP different from all the other groups that were around at that time?

It was the music and the arrangements. It began with the local wedding and dance music, the old music from the region, but we started to play music from different parts of Finland and then we were open to a lot of influences from Sweden, too. We also started to compose our own material.

The sound is the same as it has been for a hundred years. Double bass is the newest instrument in the band, historically, because that landed in Kaustinen in the 1950s. It's new music, but with the traditional band sound. Even when we are playing quite modern music, you can hear the style of the old masters in the bowing and comp. It's a kind of heritage that comes from inside us somehow.

What were the Swedish influences?

A Swedish trio called Forsmark Tre influenced a lot of JPP's music. They visited the Kaustinen Festival in 1982 for the first time. They had a pump organ and two violins. What was different to Kaustinen music was that in Kaustinen they used to play just melody and then comp, but Forsmark Tre played melody and obbligato -- the second voicing -- and chords that were new for traditional music. So it was a big inspiration for us.

Forsmark Tre fiddler Erik Rynefors also played the nyckelharpa [keyed fiddle] and that was the first time I had heard it. I liked the sound so much that I thought, "I want to play that instrument some day." In 1987 I acquired a nyckelharpa. First I played five years just by myself, listening to records, and then I also studied in Sweden with Olov Johansson, the "world champion" from the group Väsen.

For a fiddler, what's different about playing nyckelharpa? One obvious difference is that you press keys to fret the strings, but how does it feel different?

It's a different position, of course, because it's down here [supported with a strap and held in a guitar-like position]. It is bowed, so that's the same, but the bow is about a third the length of a violin bow and heavier. [The bowing hand is positioned below the strings; the bow is moved perpendicularly to the ground.] The instrument is kind of a mixture of viola and hurdy-gurdy. So the tuning is near the viola [from low to high the viola is tuned CGDA, while the standard nyckelharpa tuning is CGCA], but then fretting with keys is a similar system to the hurdy-gurdy. The English term "keyed fiddle" is actually a better term than the Swedish "nyckelharpa" [literally "key harp"]. It's not a harp; it's more of a violin-type instrument. The original name comes from Germany: Schlüsselfidel [key fiddle]. It's an old instrument, from the 1400s. Then it came to Scandinavia with the troubadours and survived only in Sweden. The nyckelharpa I'm playing is chromatic, but the older ones are diatonic.

What can you do on a nyckelharpa that you can't do on a fiddle?

Hmmm. The sound is very different because of the resonating strings and the sort of reverb from the sound. On the chromatic nyckelharpa there are twelve sympathetic strings, one for each step on the scale. So whatever note I play there is always a sympathetic string ringing at the same time. The tunes are similar to the traditional fiddle tunes, but the key is a little different. Nyckelharpa tunes are mainly in C and F because of the tuning, while on fiddle it's D and G. Basically you can do the same licks on both instru-ments but with nyckelharpa it's harder to slide and also to jump big intervals in the high register. I haven't been playing it much lately, but I have a lot of new and old material for it, so maybe someday I will do an album called Arto Järvelä Plays Nyckelharpa.

Let's backtrack a bit. What happened after you graduated from the Kaustinen College of Music in 1983?

Straight after Kaustinen College I came to the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. I applied to two schools. One was a carpentry school; the other was the Sibelius Academy. So I didn't get into the carpentry school.

[Peter Marten is a journalist and translator based in Helsinki, Finland.]

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