'Happy hardcore' Danish/Swedish roots music band ... with a lilt

If you stray here from my humanities class, this isn't on the syllabus. But it's roots music. There's more of it in places like Ireland and Scandinavia, where my family came from, than there is in the United States. At least downstate Illinois.

Following are notes to myself, starting with a song I'd like to play myself, and a kind of lilty (if that's a word), swinging style I want to develop in my own playing. So if you'e taking HUM 223, you can relax now ...

Heard on this week's Multe Music Scandinavian roots music program out of Northfield, Minn., a lovely Danish polska dance tune called "Bugge and Busk" after the musicians featured on the cut, or, more accurately "pohlsk dans efter Jens Millersen Bjergs nodebog No. 49" [polska dance after Jens Millersen Bjerg's notebook No. 49], featuring Kristian Bugge on fiddle and Nikolaj Busk on keyboard. They're part of a group of Danish and Swedish musicians calling itself Totakt-pols (which means a two-beat variation of a three-beat dance that sounds to my undereducated ear a little bit like 6/8 but maybe a little slower and with more of a lilt). According to the profile on its MySpace page, Totakt-pols is a "Folk / Acoustic / Happy Hardcore" band. Other personnel are Steffan Søgard Sørensen, bass; Gerd Nielsen, accordion; and Åke Persson, fiddle.

"Bugge og Busk" a.k.a. "pohlsk dans efter Jens Millersen Bjergs nodebog No. 49" is on the MySpace page, along with three or four other audio cuts and a video of a dance in Copenhagen. And links to Friends including Busk's MySpace page, which has a tune called "Sparta and Haltwhistle Common" with the same subtle interplay between keyboard and fiddle. He says his genres are "Folk / Experimental / Jazz," and he claims Mozart, Gustav Mahler, Bach and Carl Nielsen as musical influences, as well as the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Louie Armstrong. "Atitlan" is a fascinating blend with a catchy little melody that's almost Beatle-linke, and, again, that lilt. Way too many links to follow ... a trio called Habbadám, from the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Poland, that plays Norwegian poskas and a wonderfully lilting little thing called "I Markersen ja traff ejn majn." Sounds Celtic, or, as they say in their MySpace blurb, "Strong connections can be made to both Scandinavian, Baltic and English music." Which may have something to do with why Habbadám has played a folk festival in New Zealand and has several dates in Scotland this fall.

Anyway ... most of these groups are young, although I noticed a couple of established groups like Hoven Droven and an old-fashioned Danish accordionist named Karl Skaarup (Folk / Acoustic / Roots Music) who would fit right in on a 500-watt radio station in the Midwest. Scandinavia has a burgeoning acoustic-traditional-jazz-rock scene, most of which puts our indie label singer-songwriters to shame, and I've been spending way too much time with it this afternoon!