Albums : Annbjørg Lien : Waltz With Me
Albums : Annbjørg Lien : Waltz With Me
Listen To Annbjørg Lien : Waltz With Me
Listen To Annbjørg Lien : Waltz With Me
Who Is Annbjørg Lien?
Lien began playing Hardanger at age 6. Growing up in a musical family in the district of Sunmore on Norway's west coast, she developed an early love of traditional Norwegian music. "Both of my parents loved and played folk music, so I grew up listening to the traditional styles," she says, "My dad played the Hardanger himself, so he was my teacher in the first years. It seemed like a natural thing at home, but in the area there was no tradition. I had to travel to meet people who had the same interests and we did a lot of that." She studied classical violin along with Hardanger, but gave up the former when it became too restricting. "I wanted to dive deeper into the music," she says, "I felt the two styles were kind of closing doors for each other, both technique-wise and how I experienced it by playing, so I stopped the classical and just went on with folk one hundred percent. But I'm very happy today that I had the classical together with the folk, for the technique and for the beauty of the classical music." This classical technique has also enabled her to solo with Norway's major symphony orchestras.
Making music her life's work was a foregone conclusion. "I've been asked before when did I decide to do this for a living, when did I decide to be a musician, and I never decided that. It was just suddenly there and there was no return."
She is equally at home in folk, jazz, New Age, and stadium-rock idioms. On one of her earliest albums, Annbjørg, she heads a group of Norwegian jazz artists. Subsequent works found her delving more deeply into the folk tradition. Kjellstadslåtter, for example, is a collection of tunes from her home district and she has won numerous national championships in traditional music.
In 1987, she and Arve Moen Bergset, Steinar Ofsdal, and Bjorn Ole Rasch formed the group Bukkene Bruse (Billy Goats Gruff). The group has toured the world, receiving rave reviews wherever they've played. In 1994, they had the double honor of playing for the closing ceremonies of the Lillehammer Olympics and winning a Norwegian Grammy. That same year, her solo work was introduced to North America on Shanachie's Sweet Sunny North compilation.
One of the projects that Lien finds most rewarding is Bukkene Bruse's work with the Norwegian relief organization Redd Barna (Save the Children Foundation.) In 1998, the group was appointed ambassadors for the organization. They made a trip to Mozambique to find out about Redd Barna's work there and to collaborate with local musicians. "We worked with children and they were dancing and singing, so natural," she reminisces, "We [in the North] think too much. Everything is planned; everything is decided. We are trapped by all of the things we have. What's important to us is valueless. They have nothing and they are happy and are dancing from day to day. I think everybody should take a trip like that once a year as a reminder. In a musical way, I was inspired by the freshness." Some of the children's singing can be heard on Lien's latest release Baba Yaga.
Between working with Bukkene Bruse, she has released several solo efforts. Baba Yaga and the tour in support of it were both made possible by a prestigious Norwegian culture grant that she received in 1998. She has an appreciation of the Norwegian government's healthy support of the arts: "I'm able to do concerts and tours because of that. It opens up some doors and you're able to make a living." The grant she received was the first to go to a folk musician. "That was a big victory for folk music in Norway, because it's always gone to rock music or classical or jazz."
Waltz With Me Review
It's been quite a while since the world at large heard anything from Norwegian fiddler Annbjørg Lien. This international lineup documents the work she wrote for the Telemark Festival, a series of pieces, both instrumentals and songs. Lien herself sticks to the hardanger fiddle, and the music has a curious mix of her native country with American old-time, where the accents are provided by Bruce Molsky. His playing is wonderful, although his singing doesn't compare with guest Kirsten Bråten Berg. There are wonderful interactions between the instruments, and a lot of the music takes unusual turns, as on "Masques" and "The Old Car," but never more so than on "Dancing the Years All Away," with its slightly lurching rhythm where the melody and the vocal lines almost pull away from each other in a mesmerizing fashion. It's not as obviously forward-looking as some of Lien's other work, and here she becomes part of the ensemble, not the star, but in its own quieter way, it's just as adventurous and satisfying.
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