Wimme Saari

Joik Yoik Nomadic Sami Traditional Sami Image

"To me, joiking the deepest way to give out my feelings and my background," said Sami (Lapp) joiker Wimme Saari. "It makes my life fuller."

The joik, pronounced yoik, is the singing of the once-nomadic Sami people, whose homeland lies north of the Arctic Circle, with territory is Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Herding reindeer was their life, and it's recalled on Wimme's third album, Cugu, (Northside) which "is a word we use to call puppies," he explained. "In my childhood we had reindeer dogs, who had puppies, and I'd play with them. So inside the track are the puppies and my father's best reindeer dogs." " The joik isn't a song as we know it, according to writer and musician Andrew Cronshaw. "It doesn't rhyme, and there's not a real structure to it. It's usually improvised, about a place, or a person, or an animal. There's not even a set tune. More than anything, it's about expressing oneself."

Wimme, now 41, grew up in a Sami household in Northwest Finland. "My father was a reindeer herder," he recalled. "I never really did that, although my oldest brother did. But it was all around, and I grew up with it."

As a child, joiking fascinated him, even though it wasn't something his parents did. Instead he learned by listening "to the older people. Mostly it was on Sami radio, which had old joik and I bought some records."

"To me, joiking the deepest way to give out my feelings and my background," said Sami (Lapp) joiker Wimme Saari. "It makes my life fuller."

He made his first joik at 15, and played occasional concerts. Wimme's greatest musical revelation, however, came in 1986, after he started work at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, where "I went back over some archive tapes and there was my uncle's joiking from 1956 and 1963. That was big for me, because I didn't know they had these archives. I listened to them and made copies. And in there I found my background. Learning more of this joiking, my own people's joiking, had an effect. When I met some musicians, we tried to do something together with a little band, doing jazz and joik." It proved to be an unsuccessful combination, because, Wimme noted, "the old joiks are very moody, rhythmic music. They don't work with other music." He needed something that was his own.

And he discovered it when he began working with the experimental band Rinneradio in 1990, creating the modern joik, which differs from the older ones, he explained, "because it has longer singing lines. But the thinking and feeling is the same." "With Rinneradio I started to make my own joiks with my style," he remembered. "Before that, I felt I was like in prison when I tried to do things the same way every time. The music wasn't alive."

While he felt that their first two albums together were "very rhythmic and abstract." he's happiest with Cugu, which "is much more alive. There's more feel about it." If anything, it's even more abstract, with the atmospheric scattershot fragments of "Eallima Barut," sounding like echoes from a distant world.

"I'm impressed by the man, and think he's a great joiker and certainly of significance," assessed Cronshaw, "although his earlier recordings are somewhat over-rated ambient noodling."

It's music that has strong, guttual similarities to Native American singing, as Wimme knows.

"To me, it's all joiking, and it's very similar to the old way my uncle joiked," he exclaimed flatly. "In the '80s I was in Sakatchewan and the Yukon, and I had the chance to listen to their music. And I have an old 1936 tape of Navajo singing, which sounds completely like a joik."

And like Native American singing, joiking, even modern joiking, has a definite power. For years ago, after Wimme composed "Texas" he was invited to perform at the South by Southwest festival in that state. Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe not. For Wimme, the most important thing about singing is that "the joik is the most powerful way to express Sami culture and keep it alive. This is my background, my people, my music."

This article first appeared on Sonicnet.com

Wimme Saari

"To me, joiking the deepest way to give out my feelings and my background," said Sami (Lapp) joiker Wimme Saari. "It makes my life fuller."

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