Riksi

I went last night to Atilerijas Pagrabi to hear Rikši ("REEK shee" with a rolled "r") live last night. This quintet describes itself as a post-folk band. They are terrific.

You should probably know that, if my information is correct, Latvia has the largest body of folk songs in the world -- or, more accurately, the largest body that's been transcribed. This is a result of the National Revival in the nineteenth century, when all the Baltic states started asserting their own unique cultures, and in singing countries like these, it meant in part collecting, transcribing, and performing this huge body of music. I have heard that something like 36,000 songs were transcribed then, and I assume that this body of music has been added to since. For a small country, that is a lot of music. Rikši specializes in this stuff, but don't picture a mass chorus of serious Soviet singers, dressed in period folk garb and dutifully singing to glorify the Motherland. No no no -- Rikši is a bunch of young, talented hipsters who happen to love this music, and they would make you love it too.

First, the instrumentation is been hipped up a bit. The foundation is the bass, played by Ivars Utāns, and acoustic guitar (electrified for amplification, but not an electric guitar), played by Mārcis Lipskis. These rock instruments are joined by more traditional ones: Madara Broliša on fiddle and Zane Dukaļska on the hand drum that looks to be a relative of the Irish bodhrán. (For the record, these are the two women in the group; Zane is a woman's name in Latvian.) Finally, there's lead singer Ērics Zeps on accordian, which in the U.S. is an instrument most associated with polka bands playing Wisconsin supper clubs on Saturday night. As my Fulbright colleague and musicologist Justine Koontz has pointed out on her blog, in the Baltics the accordian is given a lot of respect, and why not? It's not an easy instrument to play, less so when you're singing as well. Which they all do while they play.

Rikši is a blast because, while the musicians treat this music very seriously, they don't treat it reverently, as if this body of music were a museum piece to be dusted off every ten years or so, performed, and then put back into the display case. They have fun with it, and the pleasure they take in performing is evident when you see them live. I'm not going to describe Latvian folk music very well, other than to say that it's eminently singable, with lots of short verses, plenty of repetition, and reasonable vocal ranges so that singers of a wide range of abilities could sing it. I picked up the tunes immediately, though not the words. And the quality of the singing reminded me that while the Baltics are northern European countries, they are also, to an extent, eastern European as well; Rikši sings with that forthright, full-throated, forward chest voice sound -- especially the women -- that I associate with sturdy peasants who make it clear that they are not be messed with.

The most remarkable thing about the evening was the audience. There was a table of oldsters, including me, but the youngsters outnumbered us by an enormous degree. (Now that I am in my mid-50s and officially an Old Person, I have permission to refer to them as "youngsters.") And they sang along with every song that Rikši played, danced, and had a great time of it. I cannot imagine a similar group of Americans singing "Shenandoah" or "The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night" at a bar. But then it's worth remembering that in a small nation like Latvia, this body of music is very much part of a cultural heritage that people seriously want to preserve precisely because Latvia is a small nation; it's one way to assert one's Latvian-ness in the presence of much larger powers. (Read: Russia, Germany, Poland.) And Latvians were pretty much born in choirs, and they remain there until their voices give out. It's estimated that two out of three Latvians sing in a choir. Note that this does not mean that they have sung in a choir at some point; it means that, at any given time, two out of three Latvians are currently singing in a choir. This is astonishing to me. No wonder they organized a "singing revolution" to throw off the Soviet yoke.

You might want to head over to Rikši's home page and listen to some clips. You can like them on Facebook too, and Artilerijas Pagrabi's Facebook page has a slew of photos of the evening, some of them with yours truly in them. Rikši's webpage is in Latvian, but you can probably figure it out, so click on the links and check them out: www.riksi.lv.