Here I am at the historic Mokkiriya jazz cafe and live house, founded in 1971 in Kanazawa, Japan, with the unique Norwegian-Finnish musical artist Sinikka Langeland. Meeting her in western Japan is as fortuitous as it is unlikely. Sinikka performs jazz-inflected songs inspired by the traditional music of the Forest Finns on a 39-string kantele (a kind of harp that sits horizontally on a table) that are haunting and unforgettable. How did we get here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the only night I could conceivably visit Kanazawa, and fatefully, Sinikka was performing at Mokkiriya on this night, on tour from Norway. Mostly, Japanese artists perform at Mokkiriya, but the other act I had managed to see at Mokkiriya, the year before, was a teenage American banjo prodigy whose singing also conveys a knowing way beyond her years. Why I needed to come to Japan to discover these two, I don\u2019t know, but fate is always smiling on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not knowing anything about Norwegian or Finnish traditional music, I watched a video of Sinikka. She sounded like nothing I\u2019d ever heard before. Right away, I felt she was a healer, her voice and music arising from deep in the earth. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The first artist I thought that about was the gospel blues artist Blind Willie Johnson, whose recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”<\/a> was included on the Voyager Golden Record sent into space by NASA in 1977. His voice is gravelly and world-weary yet deeply connected to life. If a mountain or a canyon could sing, it might sound like him. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinikka\u2019s singing is as clear as a bell. Yet, the purity of her voice and her decisive intonation, coupled with the dulcet sounds of her instrument, also express something profound, conveying compassion, mystery, and an ancient knowing. Gently, her music flows all around us, free of impurity and full of wonder, like a spring whose pristine and palliative waters well up from some primordial source. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n