lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

It’s a brilliant plan: the annual “come and try out the courses at Tobo” and the reunion for all previous ESI students happen on the same day, so the potential new students get an entire houseful of enthusiastic graduates. We were invited to join in the two-hour morning class session (one hour each with Sonia and Ditte) in exchange for lunch, so nearly the whole playing class showed up to learn a couple of bonus tunes. I think most of the prospective students stuck around for dinner (taco night! lots of yummy cake in honor of ESI’s 15th anniversary!) and the evening dance.

As you’d expect with an alumni pool including David Eriksson, Magnus Holmström, and Anna-Kristina Widell, the dance sets and jam sessions were super-awesome. Nice dancing, too, with more dance alumni and other folks in the house. I chose to spend a fair chunk of my evening sitting in on sessions that were over my head — tricky harpa rep at lickety-split tempos — in order to pick up some new tunes to digest later, with an end result that I came out of it feeling kind of depressed about not being 10 years farther along. But I could’ve fixed that with another couple hours of a more accessible session if I’d just had a couple more hours…

First we found out that two of our classmates, Jonathan & Einar, play in the band that won last year’s competition at the Linköping festival. Then we found out that their band will be playing at Umefolk, the festival in Umeå in February. And we listened to some of the tunes they’ve written/arranged together, and they are awesome. So we thought, hey, we should go and hear them play!

But, Umeå isn’t all that conveniently located, so although Andrea was in for sure, I wanted to know at least a leeeeetle bit more about who else was on the program, and exactly when it would be and how much it cost,… And as of mid-December there was no info posted yet. But I emailed the super-nice festival organizers and they said the new site was coming soon — and they also said, hey, wanna play a dance set in exchange for free festival admission?

So, after discovering that the entire lineup is in fact quite exciting — several of our teachers are playing (Olov and Niklas and Mia), and Bruce Molsky is playing with Mikael Marin & Ånon Egeland, and check out the rest of the list too! — and then going through a stint of being the first on the waitlist, we are now officially booked for our first festival gig in Sweden!! As, I hasten to add, a late-night shift of volunteer sign-up, opposite the super-impressive real main bands — so it’s just a touch embarrassing that the site graphical presentation gives us all equal real estate. But still: pretty cool, huh?!

We did a little photo shoot yesterday, ’cause our existing publicity pics have different instruments than the ones we’ll be playing. Though then we ended up doing outdoor pics in the pretty light, so you only see instrument cases anyway. But we are quite pleased with the results — special thanks to Johannes for valiant camera-wielding duty out in the cold! (And to Thomas for the beautiful folkdräkt wristwarmers!)

Our festival page = umefolk.umeafolkmusik.se/artister/lydia-andrea

Here is a video showing David’s and my halling performance from the ESI Julkonsert. Thanks, Ingrid!

So far this has been the most fun concert of the Tobotorsdag series. Tensta is close enough to here that a number of the faces were already familiar from festivals/jams around Uppland. They’re an energetic bunch, and they clearly enjoy playing together. The program was fairly well polished and wide ranging, beginning with a couple of numbers from their Xmas rep (entertaining arrangements of “Winter wonderland” and “Santa Claus is coming to town”) and then settling into a more usual diet of mostly-trad, mostly-Swedish, finishing up with a rousing Russian number.

The instrumental and dance groups have some overlap in membership, so a few hardy souls were on stage [sic] the whole time. The dance group’s rep had some choreographed couple-dance-in-a-ring sorts of things that reminded me of Danish dances, and some sets that looked just like English ceilidh dances, and some quadrilles. There was a waltz quadrille set to a waltz tune we had just learned from Olov the previous day.

I present here a (very dark) video of a schottis quadrille, because I had never heard of such a thing so maybe you haven’t either. I missed the very first bit, but it was the same as the end. Pretty neat, huh?