Things were a bit rowdy at SFI today. Not in a bad way; there was a lot of laughter amid the general melee. And, while I only understood about one word in every 30 that Ninni said, I enjoyed the class. Though, I did spend an inordinate amount of time teaching Djouma how to form the number ‘5’.
I remained calm while all the time yelling inside “I am not a teacher!” Which had me remembering how I didn’t manage to get into Teacher’s College when I left high school back in 1973. I guess whoever decided I’d be better off doing something else was right. Though, to be fair, Djouma eventually got it right, which was a bit of a shock.
Mind you, it wasn’t as big a shock as the discovery of a bomb in Trosa.
We (Nicoline, Mirinda and I) spotted a load of flashing blue lights on the way home from an amazing folk music concert. After dropping us off, Nicoline returned via the lights then heard on the 9pm news that there was a bomb that had exploded hurting no-one and nothing. Such a genteel Trosa bomb.
Hopefully it didn’t damage all the annoying roadworks going on at the moment. We’d hate it to affect the progress.
The concert we’d attended was at the Kulturhuset at Ytterjärna, a place we always enjoy going to. The group was called Ethno on the Road and they were excellent. Folk music from all over the world…well, a few bits of the world, depending on the ethnicity of the individual performers.
Here’s a small taste of a Palestinian piece with apologies for the placement of the speaker and/or me.
The singer is a Breton whose name I don’t know. I think she may have been a last minute inclusion in the line-up because everything I found out about the group online includes a Chilean and there wasn’t one tonight.
I really wish I could name check the Breton because I thought she was amazing. She said that learning to sing in different languages was a challenge. She did it brilliantly. Being multilingual in song is an amazing skill, one I could never possibly achieve. I can’t even speak in one other than my own.
Anyway, the rest of the group were: Selma Cederwall (bass guitar), Finn Harty (trombone), Hanna-Liia Kiipus (violin, singer), Mohammed Ghoul (qanun, tambourine), Daniel Reid (saxophone) and Liliana Zavala (percussion). They came from Sweden, Estonia, England, Palestine as well as Brittany.
I’d never heard of Ethno before. To quote from their site:
Ethno is an international world music camp that has taken place in the region of Dalarna every summer since 1990. Ethno gathers around 100 participants every year, arriving from 15-20 different countries. About half of the participants come from outside Scandinavia. Ethno is open to folk musicians age 17 to 25 who have been playing folk music for a few years and is built on workshops where participants teach each other supervised by skilled artistic leader.
From: Ethno Sweden at https://ethno.se/om-ethno/?lang=en
They were pretty amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed them. As did everyone else in the audience, especially a young Egyptian woman who was also pretty amused by my telling the story of the job I was fired from before I started. She was enjoying my story so much that Nicoline invited her to join our table.
Remarkably, she looked ridiculously like Mirinda’s friend, Sophie. Because she’d been sitting behind me, I hadn’t seen her. When she sat next to me and I did see her, I did a classic double take. It was uncanny.
Now, you’d think all of that was enough for one day, but it wasn’t all that happened. We were also interviewed by Ann-Helen. She is doing freelance work for the local paper and is writing a series of articles about local immigrants from far-flung places. We are interesting because we weren’t fleeing war, avoiding climate change or following love to move to Sweden.
We had a fun chat. I’ll be sure to include the piece once it’s published.
Finally, here’s a bad photo of Ethno on the Road during their encore.
They had just received roses (as usual) and were singing a Cuban song, a cappella to a woman in the front row.
