SARAH-JANE SUMMERS & JUHANI SILVOLA
How To Raise The Wind
A Scottish and Norwegian duo, fiddle player Sarah-Jane Summers and guitarist (and more) Juhani Silvola have collaborated for fifteen years, producing four acclaimed albums. Their accolades including a Grammy nomination for “The Smoky Smirr o Rain” the NOPA Music Prize in 2022 given by the Norwegian Society of Composers and Lyricists for outstanding musical works. Listening to this, it is not difficult to imagine why, and their output also includes commissions for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a forty-five-minute piece for Canada’s Bozzini Quartet. It may also come as no surprise to discover that there is also considerable academic rigour to their work.
It is innovative, challenging, rooted but untethered to their joint traditions, the experience becomes a shared exploration between musicians extending what has gone before and listeners discovering something bold, exciting, occasionally disconcerting and thoroughly immersive and absorbing. The titles are a hint that what should be expected is the unexpected, with album opener Trolls Resent A Disturbance setting the scene in both title and tone. The album works as a piece as much as a collection of individual tracks (though the aforementioned opener was released as a single prior to the full album). Pick a genre and add a hyphenated avant in front of it and you are probably getting somewhere close.
The two main protagonists are joined by 3 further violinists, a cellist, plus a double bass, adding depth and complexity to the wonderful mix. Sometimes you have to step back and think, not only how did they do that, but where did the idea for it come? There are sounds here that I never expected to hear from a violin, but somehow in this context, they all make sense.
Not for the musically faint hearted or those with a fear of the new. Sadly, you will not be finding them performing at a cramped folk club on a wet Tuesday in Lancashire. A recent appearance at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections being as close as they are likely to get, but given the chance, I would be on the first train back there if they make a repeat visit! This year has seen some amazing instrumental albums – this is certainly one of them. Having found them, the artists have a significant back catalogue, both collectively and individually – a couple of rabbit holes well worth exploring.
PS special mention for the previously reviewed Destroyers – as their Argonaut album is largely instrumental – but still falls into the remarkable category.
Drawing as they do on folklore as well as musical tradition, you may wish to know that the album title comes from a story reported in Selected Highland Folktales, gathered orally by R. MacDonald Robertson (1961) in which a fisherman in the far North-West of Scotland told him of a strange way of raising the wind, believed in chiefly by the people of the Western Isles, and which Caithness fishermen do not like, as it affects their catch of herring. It seems that when the men leave for the fishing in July, some of the women left at home put a number of knots on a woollen thread.
Towards the end of the fishing, or earlier, if they are not successful, they undo these knots one by one, with the result that the wind begins to rise. They take care not to undo the knots at too great a rate, lest the wind should arise too suddenly, for the loss of the loved ones might in this way be brought about.
