Followed the migratory bird to the south
To record her new cd Mari Boine travelled to South-Africa – and named it after the migratory bird «Sterna Paradisea». Photo: Berit Roald/Scanpix
Red-billed tern flies all the way to Antarctica. Mari Boine comes no further than Souht-Africa.
Gitte Johannessen August 23 2009
There she recorded her new album «Sterna Paradisea», that will be released today. The title is the Latin name for the tern to which the young Mari looked furtively around every year, because this travels the farthest of all birds – to return south when the summer nears its end.
- Almost all of my albums are recorded in Oslo, in the coldest period. I said to my band, «Now we move to a warmer region», Mari Boine tells ANB-NTB. And tells how two of the melodies were written in velvet soft nights underneath the starry sky – including the title song.
The messenger of the light
– When I was young, I waited every spring for the bird; I stood on a gravel beach near our home. The tern arrives simultaneously with the midnight sun, that's why the Sami title of the song is «Cuovgga Áirras», which means 'the messenger of the light', Mari Boine tells.
On thing is that she herself has an urge to travel. Another is that she definitely chooses the light herself:
– I myself went trough a period where everything was dark, and I didn't look ahead too far. Then I decided to hang on to the little light. There is enough darkness in the world. I have expressed the anger I had and every now and then I still sing the angry songs. But I'd rather hold the light up, like a flame one has to blow air to, so it will not die out.
12 strong men choir
She took her regular musicians with her to South-Africa – Georg Buljo, Gunnar Augland, Ole Jørn Myklebust and Svein Schultz, who is also the producer. There they met Madosini Mangina together with a 12 strong men choir, Abaqondisi Brothers.
– From the moment I heard Paul Simons «Graceland», I have had a dream to get the deep, African voices on a CD also, Mari Boine says.
Good and pain
The stay in South-Africa was at both a nice and a painful experience for her.
– It was painful to see the class difference that is still present. The song «Conversation With God» is a response to what I saw there, and to what I've seen before in the Third World. Why do children have to suffer?
When the recordings in South-Africa were finished in December last year, Mari invited all collaborators for a big party.
– The whites didn't show, the blacks did. Several of them worked in the hotel where we stayed and sat at a table there for the first time. Things go slow. They also do in Finnmark. Maybe it is a bit like in South-Africa, that the lowest in class should stay like that? (ANB-NTB)Source:
http://www.dagsavisen.no/kultur/musikk/article434101.ece
