Jazz, Folk, and Forests
VICTORIA KINGHAM talks to Rebecka Edlund ahead of her performance at Jazz Hastings
To talk to Rebecka Edlund about her music is to talk to her about her innermost, heartfelt passions. They are one and the same. Ever since she stood up in her pushchair to sing for passing strangers in her home town, she tells me, you could call her a teaterapa, a theatre monkey. When young, with help from an enterprising and perceptive grandmother, she obtained the part of Jane Banks in the musical Mary Poppins at the Gothenburg Opera. The premier of the musical was on her tenth birthday.
Since then she has followed her passion for performance where it has led her. “I got obsessed by it. I didn’t go to school for a year. I just got completely mesmerised by this performing world. And since then, there’s been nothing else!” This single-minded drive for musical presentation, for invention, led her through an intensive exploration of folk music to form a band called Oknytt, which she describes as ‘Foresty-folk jazz – a concoction of Scandinavian folk music and modern jazz’. She finished three years at Trinity Laban last year, as a gold medallist.
So far, so outstanding. She already has one album with Oknytt, Något om en Björk [translates as Something about a Birch Tree]. But Edlund is more than an exceptional student. “To me”, she goes on, “language is music. It’s the same, a way of communicating. My grandmother picked up on that. I had tea once a week with granny, and we were only allowed to speak English. We had Jane Austen, all sorts of classic literature. So when I was studying English at school it became one of my favourite subjects.” Her English, in fact, is probably better than that of most English speakers. The only evidence that it’s her second language lies in its precision. Yet when I listen to her music, there seems to me a Scandinavian sound – something ethereal, pine forests and wide open spaces. I wondered whether that was just my imagination?
MUSIC FOR THE HEART
“I love hearing that, because that is my main source of inspiration and influence. Traditional folk music, Swedish folk music, gets to my heart more than any other genre. So I’ve listened to a lot of Scandinavian folk music. I studied it for two years in Falun [at the Falun Music Conservatory]. Growing up, I listened to the radio, the TV. But my main focus was writing. I played my own music, and fiddled about on the keyboard and guitar, and was very keen for anything I played to be my own material. So I was definitely influenced by folk music, but from when I was 14 or 15, it was just a big mixture of whatever was in front of me.”
Her interest, after gaining the place at Trinity Laban, was jazz. “Studying folk music, I knew that I loved it”, she goes on. “But I’ve always been a big nerd, so I knew I wanted to study jazz for the more adventurous harmonic material. The main reasons were to learn more about music theory, and also a love of improvising. I’ve transcribed Ella Fitzgerald’s scat singing, and solos by Sonny Rollins. But coming out of that genre now, I’ve allowed myself to blend the genres together so I have a theoretical knowledge of jazz but also a love of the sound, the ambience of the music.”
Is this, I wonder, why she is including a twelve-string guitar in her latest performances? “It happened that my partner’s dad had given him a twelve-string so it was just there in our house! I thought, why not? It makes me feel big, it gives me confidence. Playing just with the open strings, I feel like I can get a lot of effects and sounds out of the guitar without having to play more intricate, sophisticated jazz lines – like percussion. We don’t have any drums in the band, so I like it as a sort of engine that drives the music forwards.”
OPENING NEW DOORS
One thing that she does not mention, however, is the uniqueness of her singing voice. It’s the kind of voice that is so pure, so straight, that hearing it sometimes makes you want to weep. Her vocal range is terrific, and there are very few singers who, like her, are able not only to use their voice as an instrument, but also to produce an enormous range of sound effects without sounding pretentious. I’m thinking Miriam Makeba, Badi Assad, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby McFerrin. Not that you would make comparisons, as Edlund’s music stands on its own.
The band she will be bringing to Jazz Hastings in early September will be Elliot Galvin (piano), Calus Williams (bass) and Laura Jurd (trumpet). Jurd has already made a considerable name for herself as an improvising composer, and her work is dedicated, original. Working with her, relates Edlund, “is a dream. It really is. She is obviously a brilliant musician but has become a close friend of mine. She opens [musical] doors and windows that I didn’t even know existed. I feel that, every time I play with her. And I think it’s very obvious that she’s a composer – she really takes care of the wholeness of it, the story line, throughout the gig. And she’s also not afraid of not playing. So when she does, it really means something.” Galvin, too, is someone who uses the whole piano, sometimes using the strings of the grand piano to make the sound of a harp, sometimes beating it as percussion. The three of them, as members of Virgin Forest, collaborate on a musical journey which extends the use of their instruments to produce something new, bold, unclassifiable.
“The Virgin Forest project will be recorded, next year or the year after. The songs I wrote are a collection of letters to my younger and to my older self. In them I reflect on health and love, and celebrate humanity through comparison with how we treat nature and the environment. I feel lifted up, and safe, and loved, by what surrounds me. It’s been a good, self-therapeutic process, looking back on myself as a teenager compared to now. Why would I care about having a thigh gap, say, when I can put my hand on the bark of a tree or climb its pristine branches, or smell the moss?”
It’s an ambitious project. But Edlund is ambitious – she has the driving force of the best musicians, always to create something new, unique. She is completely open to every kind of musical sound. Abba? I question, half joking. “I love Abba! They know how to write good melodies, and the melodies feel like they are one with the lyrics. There’s no difference between them. That’s what I think they’re brilliant at. And they’re groovy – you can’t not dance to them!”
So the Swedish forest will come to Hastings beach in September, and Jazz Hastings will present another innovative and professional performance. It promises to be a great night, and to send us away with an extended notion of what music can be, or could become.
Rebecka Edlund’s Virgin Forest Band will play at Jazz Hastings, EHSAA, The Stade, on Tuesday 3 September. Doors open 7.45 for an 8.30 start. Details and all gigs: jazzhastings.co.uk/upcoming-gigs
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