Last night the Chicken Step Lady and I attended a concert, part of the annual Nordic Roots Festival, at the Cedar Cultural Center. The headline act was Hedningarna, about whom you've heard me enthuse before (see https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/jugglernaut/bandnames/Hutenanny.html). This group is even more dynamic in person than on CD, especially if you happen to be sitting close enough to distinguish the individual strings on the fiddle. I chair-danced through the whole concert and didn't get home until after midnight.
The opening act, Wimme (pronounced "vee-may" or "vee-muh"), is the one I want to tell you about today. Wimme Saari is a modern yoik singer. Yoik is a traditional Sami chant that has similarities to Native American music in its transmission of knowledge and its reverence for the earth and the elements. The Sami (Lapps) are the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and northwestern Russia.
So you'd think we were in for an hour or two of solemn, lore-preserving tradition. And occasionally we were; Wimme did yoik several animals a cappella in the middle of his set. (One yoiks the animal or the person or the land; one does not yoik about them. Near as I can tell from what little I've read, yoiking is a way of personifying, understanding and interpreting, rather than of objectively describing. and a yoik changes with the yoiker's mood.) My favorite was the reindeer. In the tone and cadence, I could clearly sense a reindeer coursing over a vast white landscape.
However, that was only part of the performance; most of it blended tradition and technology. Wimme was accompanied onstage by two men: a strings player who resembled soon-to-be-ex-governor Ventura in a shirt patterned with flying squirrels or something, and a rhythm section that consisted of one grinning tech/music geek with an electronic keyboard and a laptop computer. A sound mixer orchestrated from the back of the room. In a typical piece, the keyboardist would start up with a beat like the bossa nova setting from Grandma's old electric organ, overlaid with some grinding techno ambient sounds as well as electronic squirks and bleeps. The string man provided highlights and sometimes melody, plinking away on a ukulele, guitar, mandolin or banjo.
Then Wimme's voice would slide in, sounding sometimes like a nasal techno-groan itself and sometimes like a regular (and very versatile) singing voice. He might hold a tone for a long stretch while the undertones milled about, or chant with hypnotic rhythm over very little background, or add a spoken voiceover to the instruments. Or he might, as he did in for an encore, approach the microphone with a fierce expression, then throw his head back and gargle. If you're yoiking an aquatic environment, I guess that's what you do.
Whatever Wimme did, it was riveting. A modest-sized man with a shaven head, dressed in leather boots and leggings and a linen-grey tunic trimmed in rich green embroidery, he often stood motionless at center stage with his hands clasped behind him. Occasionally he would gesture, but the focus was always on the sound, the voice.
To what tribe does he belong? To the tribe of all who have ever shyly warbled out their own interior songs, bouncing them off the shower tiles just for fun. It didn't matter that he spoke maybe a dozen words of English throughout his entire show. Words weren't what he came to communicate. He came to bring and to be music — serious, silly, gritty, smooth, quiet, insistent, and everything. I don't think he needs a visa for that.