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Points of Contact

by Catherine Madsen

I didn’t expect to encounter Scandinavian folk music for the first time on Georges Collinet’s NPR program . But in 1997 Collinet featured , a collaboration between two African musicians (both of whom had settled in Norway) and two Norwegian musicians. Kora virtuoso Solo Cissokho of Senegal, drummer and mouth bow player Kouame Sereba of the Ivory Coast, together with singer Kirsten Bråten Berg and mouth harp player Bjørgulv Straume, both of the Setesdal region of Norway, created an electrifying synthesis of traditional West African music and Scandinavian ballads. The two regions have rather different scales—Scandinavian music has some sharps where Americans don’t expect them—but the combination was harmonious, with that sense of inevitability that belongs to all real art. I was already listening to Kora music, and it wasn’t until years later that I developed a full-blown obsession with Scandinavian music, but it was this album that planted the seed.

Not all cross-cultural collaborations are as unexpected as this one (though the phenomenon of may be even more so), but collaboration is an inherently exciting process: it maintains cultural boundaries even while crossing them, and you never know what will happen. The interplay of styles and skills allows the focus to shift first to one tradition and then the other, and sometimes the two merge into a third style that seems a perfect expression of both. When collaborations work well, they convey both the security of belonging and the adventure of exploring someone else’s form of belonging.

You can have entree into two or more cultures in your own person, in which case the collaboration occurs between different aspects of your imagination. Stephen and Phillip Blanchett of Alaska’s own developed their brilliant fusion of Yup’ik and R&B styles by applying the harmonies and energies of their father’s African American musical culture to the songs of their mother’s Yup’ik culture. Since their mother, the distinguished scholar and translator Marie Meade, was one of the early participants in the revival of Yup’ik dance, and their cousin, artist and drum maker Ossie Kairaiuak, brought the dance tradition of Chefornak to the group, dance naturally became an essential part of the band’s work. Karina Moeller of Greenland, whom they met at a gig at the Arctic Winter Games, brought not only her skills as a jazz vocalist but also a perspective from another part of the Inuit world. The band’s full story is told in Jessica Bissett Perea’s book , along with a detailed discussion of the song (Pulling), which appears in four versions on their double album (Incidentally, Solo Cissokho plays kora on one of the versions.)

Avant-garde musicians, who are already pushing the boundaries of their own traditions, may find themselves in sympathetic vibration on some transcultural wavelength. of Nunavut, having learned Inuit throat singing from recordings rather than in singing games with a partner, took the form in a radically new and deeply expressive direction; Icelandic singer , another radical innovator, invited her to collaborate on an , a project that . Tagaq has since collaborated with many other artists, including Mongolian throat singer and Sámi yoiker , worked on many projects with the , and created a new soundtrack for the 1922 silent film , always guided by her intuitive sense of what the next moment requires.

Young artists are always being told that you have to learn the rules before you can break them. It’s worth asking what kind of rules those are. Are they “the rules” as in the Chicago Manual of Style, under the oversight of a central authority who can tell you when you’re breaking them? Or are they “the rules” as in the laws of physics, which you couldn’t break if you wanted to? (“Gravity: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”) I would suggest that “the rules,” for musical collaborators, are more like yuuyaraq—which in Yup’ik culture means the way of the human being, and which amounts to reciprocity, responsibility, a quiet self-discipline, and a general disposition toward helpfulness. These are rules you could break, but you don’t want to; once you see how they work, there are infinite ways to apply them, and it’s too interesting to stop. It might be constraint, but instead it turns out to be an extravagant freedom. In music, ninety percent of collaboration (maybe ninety-nine percent) is listening and responsiveness: you know how to do the work, but what you’re really paying attention to is each other, finding out how your style can assist the other’s. Is that following or breaking the rules? Maybe it’s becoming more like the laws of physics: finding the laws of your nature, so that the music seems to happen of itself, as if inevitably.

 

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