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From the pages of fROOTS Magazine
Ellika Frisell and Solo Cissokho
A Hit Of Strings
One of this year's freshest, most unlikely and yet most successful meetings of musical minds has been that of Sweden's Ellika Frisell and Senegal's Solo Cissokho. Andrew Cronshaw hops off to Stockholm to learn more.
Ellika Frisell strikes up on the fiddle with the lurching three-beat of a Swedish polska and, as couples move onto the dance-floor, Solo Cissokho's kora begins to add in gutty notes and rippling phrases. When the three-beat moves subtly into the fours of a Senegalese tune and Solo begins to sing, the dancers can be seen to be concentrating, but they persevere, each couple somehow finding or imagining a continuing polska pulse, and adding steps for the extra beat or dancing across it until the one comes round again. The experiences of the fiddler, the kora player and the dancers touch, and a new creature starts to evolve.
Ellika is a well-known Swedish Þddler, deeply skilled in traditional playing and an ex-member of a string of leading bands including one of the most adventurous of the early Swedish roots revival, Filarfolket, and the mighty rock-polska band Den Fule. Solo is from Casamance, the southern part of Senegal that's nearly cut off from the north and Dakar by the strip of the Gambia. He comes from a large and well-known griot family, which includes his nephew, Seckou Keita, a kora player also well-known in Europe from his playing with Martin Cradick and others. "I like him - he's very talented, Seckou," says Solo. "I was born two years after his mother. I am the third child; his mother was number two." Solo returns annually to Senegal, but he now lives in Norway, where he has his own band and also collaborates with traditional singer Kirsten Bråten Berg in the From Senegal To Setesdal project.
The duo of Ellika & Solo is by no means a result of calculating fusionism. "People think that we have constructed this music! I'll tell you a secret - we haven't!" divulges Ellika. "Because neither of us is good at thinking in systems; we don't do that, we just play." Solo agrees "It's like when she plays a tune, Swedish folk music, I listen. Perhaps I hear a connection between it and a traditional song on the kora. Or I play something, she listens, and goes 'maybe this can work with that'."
Ellika and Solo
Tretakt takissaba
$16.99
Ellika Frissell, one of Sweden's best fiddlers meets Solo Cissokho, a master of the cora from Senegal. Together they make colorful music, where the polska meets the rhythmic flow of the west African harp. These are all duets with no extra musicians, full of lively counter point and interesting, sometimes playful exchanges between two intuitive and inventive musicians.
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Listen
Brodkakan
Takissaba polska
| "If another album comes along this year which fuses two acoustic instruments from theoretically gulfs-apart traditions in such a wonderfully successful, natural, joyful way, then it's going to be a vintage twelvemonth indeed. Norway-resident Solo Cissokho (who's incidentally the uncle of sometimes UK-resident kora smartypants Sekou Keita) comes from the same Casamance kora tradition as Kausu Kuyateh - all punchy bass strings, snappy riffs and danceable as hell. Taking that as a foundation, Frisell weaves polska fiddle, schottisches and waltzes in and around and under, and both improvise seven shades of shit out of it all - but never losing sight of the core music or letting virtuosity get the better of them..." - Ian Anderson, fROOTS |
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