Harald Haugaard
It's nine p.m. on a Tuesday, and Harald Haugaard has just finished teaching his last class of the day. Late hours for education, but Haugaard is no stranger to working hard. In addition to being Associate Professor and head of the Folk Music Programme at Denmark's famous Carl Nielsen Academy in Odense, he's also a fiddler of international renown, half of the duo Haugaard and Høirup, a founder member of the muscular folk-rock band Serras, a producer of note. Not bad for a man who's barely hit thirty. And he recently released yet another CD pairing him with jazz drummer Anders Mogensen (who also teaches at the Academy) on a set of traditional Danish fiddle tunes. You have to wonder when the man sleeps.
"I don't know the word no," he laughs wryly. "I'm trying to learn it, but it's kind of hard."
For now, though, he has the energy to keep all the balls in the air, although he admits that "the most important work I do is the duo work with Morten. Then I have Serras, my band." But being involved in many diverse things is simply vital to who he is.
"Music is a dialogue with the people you play with, and it's a lot more fun to be in a dialogue than working alone. It's a lot more fun to develop and create music together than do it yourself." |
"That dialogue found its most recent exposure on Spirits, his album with Mogensen, along with bass and guitar. Recorded in just two days, the entire project had an air of spontaneity about it, as "Anders and I had two sessions, just fiddle and drums. He plays around the beat and I thought that was so much fun because folk music is playing around the beat, because the dancers are keeping the beat, and as a fiddler you can play around that. Then we had two rehearsals with the guitarist and bassist. They're both from the strong jazz scene we have in Denmark, and they're good, creative musicians, so it was easy. Then we had two days in the studio. So it was kind of short preparation, and the music is pretty much live, you play a lot of mistakes, but it's got spirit and so much life."
Yet it doesn't feel rushed. Instead it's an exploration of the nooks and crannies of Danish music, often from an unusual (and quite unfolk-like) perspective.
"It's probably because the guys are skilled, but they've never played this kind of music before, so they have a totally other view," Haugaard offers. "They know some tunes, everyone knows some tunes from their own culture, but they've been so much into American jazz so that's their point of view into Danish music."
Haugaard was one of the disc's producers, and that's a hat he's been wearing more often in recent years, most notably last year with Karen + Helene's Solen.
"I did some production for Baltinget and Zar, but that was the most challenging because the project was huge and so many musicians were involved in it. It was a kind of dream project. Of course it's their record, but it's my record, too, all three of us together. They were both students of mine. I've known Helen since she was a small kid. We grew up twelve kilometres apart and she went to my mother's folk dance classes and later on I taught her fiddle from the age of 16, and she came to the Academy. I haven't known Karen as long, but they're both very close to my heart. The instrumental part of folk music has always been alive on Fanø and other places, but the vocal tradition has only been alive among common people, in the church and when we sing Christmas carols. The regional traditions have been dead for twenty years, and they've been bringing these traditions up again, and I thought that was very interesting."
Unlike most albums released in Denmark.
Solen
revolved around songs, rather than tunes - ironic when you consider that Denmark has Europe's oldest and largest collection of ballads, quite a number of which would be familiar in translation to anyone who's read their Child's. But in Denmark the ballads are taught as literature, rather than music."Everyone who goes to the common school and the high school learns a lot of these ballads, all the words, but not the melodies or the stories behind them, and that's pretty sad. We had a common culture in Europe for many years, and they're part of that. The English words are a little different, and so are the Swedish words, but the stories are the same and how you tell it. I played with Sorten Muld, and that was a kid of electronica-techno thing combined with medieval ballads. So many in Denmark knew all the words but not the tunes. They had quite a big success with the project, a lot of people liked it because it was their roots."
Sorten Muld released a couple of albums internationally (Mk. II and Mk. III), and definitely broke down barriers with their electro-acoustic approach.
"It was the two technicians and a singer," Haugaard recalls. "They asked a lot of us to be involved, some of us playing live, some on the album. They worked with different musicians. I was involved from the very beginning, then I took a break because I had other things to do and then I was back in the end. Everyone in Denmark knew about it four or so years ago. You could walk down the street and tell people you played with this band and they knew who you were. Nowadays I do play with a Danish punk-rock singer - that's another side thing and a lot of fun. I like to try different things, get experience in different things."
Among those different things is Serras, a folk-rock outfit that recently released their third disc, Please Stand Clear of the Sliding Doors. Whilst folk-rock has a slightly grubby, dated name in Britain, the Danish model seems more based on rock-folk, with a powerful yet supple bottom end. But for Serras, it's a matter of intellect as well as notes, Haugaard points out.
"We've been talking about what we find common between eighteenth century folk dance music from Denmark and a lot of rock music. It's obviously that both musics have a physical element. I think that's what's combined for the five of us and attracts us to the music. We've become brothers because we've been playing together so much. We did a big theatre piece last autumn. We don't agree about everything we do. When we play, though, it's a lot of fun, because we can each find a little piece of ourselves in it. We work as a collective, arrange everything together at rehearsals. It's very demanding and it takes a lot of time, but it means we all find ourselves in it when we play it live. That's extremely necessary, and a great thing - it keeps us together."
To Haugaard it seems perfectly natural to move from one area to the other. But music has always been a part of his life.
"My grandfather was an accordion player and wood carver. He had his own dancehall in the middle of Jutland. Every Friday night in the summer time there was a dance. I went to many of them, played at them, sitting next to him, learning about music and life. My mother taught folk dance, she'd bring dance to children and older people, and I played for the dance classes, the ceilidhs and everything. She wanted me to be a dancer, and when you're a nine year-old boy you don't want to dance with the girls! At some point I think she could see it wouldn't work. Then she found out I could play the fiddle for folk dance, and so I did. I played four evenings a week for six years, so I played a lot of dance music, and that's a huge background for me. It was a pain in the ass sometimes, but I did get a lot of experience from it, and nowadays I see where I have my physical element. I was also studying classical violin. I studied some other instruments and also played a lot of rock'n'roll music on the fiddle and on the drums. When I was about sixteen I met Anja and Jesper from Phønix, and we decided to make a band. That was at the beginning of the Nineties, and we had the band for about a year and a half. There weren't too many young people who played folk then, but we decided it was our thing, although we felt quite alone. Somehow we're all involved with each other, even if we don't play together any more."
Given his obvious talent, a formal musical education seemed the next step, and he was enrolled as a student at the Carl Nielsen Academy, named for Denmark's most famous composer, where he "studied classical music for two years, then I went to the head and said 'My heart belongs to folk music and I know I'm going to make my living at it.' He said, let's experiment. The last two years I went around to the old fiddlers, like Peter Uhrbrand from Fanø and some others. I graduated as a folk musician. From that the people in the academy saw that it could work if they wanted to make a real folk music education."
"Globalisation is a big gift for all of us. We can get to know about each other's cultures." |
"Poul Lendal, the hurdy-gurdy player from Lang Linken (leaders of the first Danish folk revival in the 1970s), he was the head of course. Then I was head-hunted to head the programme. I didn't really want to do it because I was quite young at the time, and many of the students were my friends - some of them, like the guys from Phønix, I played with in another band named Dug. So it was a decision that took a couple of weeks. Nowadays I'm happy I do it, because it gives you a lot to be connected to young people who want to get out there. It's a supplement to everything else. You could educate in many ways. You could go to an old fiddler sitting in his kitchen for four years and learn all about his life, his style, and all his tunes. That's one way to do it. But this programme is another way, and I think we've succeeded. In the beginning there were so many people from the folk music scene who didn't the idea of folk music in an academy and so many classical people and from the Ministry of Culture who thought folk music was dirty. But it's proved its worth. All the folk musicians who thought the music would die when it came in here see that the exact opposite has happened, it's brought new life into the music, and that's what folk music is about, developing the tradition."
It's certainly no accident that a new generation of folk musicians is now arriving and helping Denmark's musical star burn brighter.
"All of them have huge respect for the old guys. Part of the teaching is to go to the old fiddlers and see how they play. The students go to Himmelin or Fanø or wherever to see how it works. The people who study here all want to find the old guys, the fiddlers and singers, and drag something out of them. The guys who were young in the Seventies, like the Lang Linken guys, they're now the tradition carriers, and they're teaching here, and I'm happy about it. They have the integrity of the music."
But even as he teaches as plays in other ensembles, Haugaard keeps a firm focus on Haugaard and Høirup, his duo with guitarist and singer Morten Høirup, which has proved to be one of the country's more successful exports in their seven years together.
"We tour all over, and we have such a good time together with the music. It's rare that you find people that you get along with as a person and musician. We're together a little more than a hundred days a year. Of course, sometimes we do sit in different parts of the aircraft. We take care of having some privacy, but I do see Morten more often than I see my wife, that's for sure! Our big thing is to go abroad with this Danish music we love so very much because we can see people in many countries. We both think it's a challenge. Morten is a single father with two kids. Many people would stop his career because of that and stay at home, but he doesn't. We both think we have many things to develop in it. The next thing we're doing is an album with guests from other countries. We play concert halls in Japan, small clubs in Germany, it's always different. We're trying to make Danish music interesting for other cultures."
Which begs the question - for those who haven't experienced it - exactly what is Danish music? Fiddle-based, it lies somewhere between the darker tones of Sweden and the airy brightness of Ireland. More than that, Haugaard insists,"there was a big influence from English and Scottish music in the seventeenth century. That influence has been so heavy that it still exists. So it's easy for Danes, when they listen to Irish music, to grab some of the details, the bowings and phrasings or whatever and put it into Danish music. Personally, I think that sometimes Danish music is more related to Scottish music than Swedish music, because we have the same kind of dances, although I know we have the polska. We're a big mix of all these things, and I think it's a great thing we have all these influences! When the minuet came to Denmark, for example, it because Danish because of the way it was played and the music that was here before."
Denmark is finally taking its place on the world music scene, and Harald Haugaard couldn't be happier.
"Globalisation is a big gift for all of us. We can get to know about each other's cultures. I see it as a bunch of people playing cards around a table. You can't be part of it unless you have your own cards. Globalisation is when you have your own thing and you meet some other people and you exchange ideas."
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