Denmark - folky home of Christmas

The place where they played - the student pub Æsken - was an experience in itself: Up on the third flour, you would find a bar in a kind of ski hut or youth club design of the eighties. Those maybe 50 people who would fit into this small pub under the roof, were also there for this concert when it finally started at 10.15 on Thursday night.
This was actually a rather superb gig of a very special band, that I enjoyed from the first minute to the last (well not the very last, because my company wanted to leave before the encore at 1 a.m. - well that's the thing when you have to work the next day). Phønix combine in their music Danish traditional music with Jazz and Rock music, and the result is indeed special. The band features three girls playing flute, bass clarinet and fiddle, plus two guys playing accordion and percussion. The music grooves a lot; especially the combination of clarinet with fiddle works extremely well. Phønix have found their very own distinctive sound, placed among the many other great innovative Scandinavian roots bands.
Their new addition was at this concert a singer, a youngish girl singing traditional Danish songs. It was quite obvious that she has not sung often with Phønix yet, as the singing was not perfectly integrated in the Phønix repertoire. Still there is a lot of potential.
I left the concert that night thinking how lucky I had been, seeing one of the best Danish bands in live during my short period here.

The Copenhagen Irish Festival was without doubt the (Folk Music) highlight of the autumn. Wonderful concerts, sessions etc. in a terrific warm atmosphere. But not much more about it here - there is a full article at another space of this issue...

Sounding like a very local community concert, I was surprised to find a full house of several hundred people in the place, already 20 minutes before the concert would start. And this very concert started with a support act, the Overlærer Madsens Orchester. Mmmmh, four oldish Danish guys singing Dubliners songs slower than the Dubliners would do, and without being very good at their instruments, and with the Overlærer Madsens himself with his accordion looking like a sixth Dubliner himself... well I guess for a living room band quite original, but as a support of top class folk music? Maybe a question of taste. Quite a few people in the audience seemed to enjoy it, so well...

Ivan and Duncan were already quite happy and relaxed when they started to play after this one-hour set of the Overlærer and friends' set, as those two Scots had been sitting with the organizers and a glass of Gammeldansk and another of Tuborg in front of them, and those glasses would always fill up automatically. Still, it had been well worth waiting for the set of the two lads; they were once again in quite a brilliant shape, and the background stories to the tunes were totally different to those they have told in spring to the same tunes. So even for fans some new items in the concert...

Bo Stief One Song III is a different story. A concert organized by the Jazz Club in Viborg, this concert was a combination of World and Roots with Jazz music, featuring a Danish double bass player, an Italian pianist and a Gipsy accordionist. Quite wonderful stuff actually, and the comments of the Dane must have been amusing as well - if you knew Danish....

Special features on folk concerts in Denmark are definitely the distinctive Danish "hygge" or coziness at the concerts. Even if the venue would in itself look absolutely ugly, the Danes manage to turn this room into a living room, with the help of candles and communication provoking seating. Quite impressive really.
Another typical feature is that if you want to listen to a concert, the first half is the better one. In the second half, after a couple of (Christmas and normal) beer, the audience relaxes more and more, as you can easily hear in the amount of talks in the audience. It is not that they would not enjoy the concert - the atmosphere is still great, maybe even better than in the first half. But at times the talks become louder than the music... But this happens not at every concert; the concert with Bo Stief at the Viborg Jazz Club stayed completely quiet the whole concert long. Is this because of Danish Jazz fans behave differently than the folkies???

Finally, a few remarks on Denmark and Europe. Europe is always big in discussion, and the Danes are not sure at all what to think about the European Union and the EURO. Still, most of them believe that the future of Denmark will be with EURO and in the EU anyway - as the overall system will force Denmark into it, like e.g. the credit card system will bring the EURO on a longer term automatically into Denmark.
Another sign in the direction of Europe is that in March 2001 the borders between Denmark and Germany will finally be opened, making it easier to cross. Denmark will become part of the Schengen area, as will the rest of Scandinavia. And this without any referendum; the only reason why these countries were not in Schengen was that the EU did not like the idea of a non-EU country (Norway) in the Schengen area, and the Scandinavian countries did not want to be split by this matter. By now the Union has made their homework, and found out that of course all Scandinavian countries control their outer borders and their airports very well.

No reason to leave Scandinavia out of the united Europe. For folk music fans, it will get even easier to get across the border; for Germans to visit all the Danish festivals, for Danes to go across the border to see some concert in the Northern German cities... And for folk musicians to combine tours of Denmark and Germany.

Scanfolk 3 will move further north, into the darkness of a Swedish January. Watch this space!

Further Reading and Info on the Danish Folk Music Scene: