We signed up to the Saami group of this Global Citizenship Challenging Europe program to learn about Saami people in London, but little did we know that worldwide there are roughly around 30.000 Saami speakers. Our challenge to find a Saami speaker in London led us to Merlyn Driver, an ethnomusicologist from Scotland. What we present to you instead, is what we called ‘contact with Saami’
He joined us on a discussion into the tradition of joik, a style of music that originates from the Saami Shamanic culture. According to oral traditions joik was given to Saami People by the fairies and elves of the arctic lands. Each joik is meant to invoke a person, an animal, a place, or an experience and joking was practiced by shamans as a means of communication with the spirits. Nowadays, it still remains a method of connection with the spiritual. As Merlyn said, “one does not joik ‘about’ something; one simply joiks it”.
Merlyn grew up in Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland and came to London to release his record and do a master’s degree in ethnomusicology. The first time he was introduced to Saami culture was in 2009, on a trip to Northern Sweden. In 2011 he travelled to the Norwegian Arctic to carry out research into “connections between joik, the Arctic movement and Saami identity.” He immediately felt a deep connection with joik. In conversation with us, he compared it to the chants of Native American cultures and he said he was surprised that it was in fact European. To him it was “different, unfamiliar and beautiful.” He stressed how difficult it is for an outsider to learn joik, given that it requires great skill that most accomplished Saami joikers start acquiring early in their childhood.
Merlyn incorporates joik in his music and you can listen to his EP that features a young Saami joiker Marja Mortensson here. We were able to listen to him sing on a rooftop bar in a beautiful London location. The contrast between the free-spiritual experience of joik overshadowed the busy corporate high-rises surrounding City of London just a block away from this rooftop bar was amplified by the intimacy of the performance taking place in a charming Elvis Presley chapel. We wanted to capture him mid-performance sat against pictures depicting Elvis and his friends to highlight the juxtaposition of this nature-centered sounds with shamanic origins to the embodiment of modern pop culture that is Elvis. It was uncanny.
References:
Qvigstad, Just (1929-01-01). Lappiske eventyr og sagn: Lappiske eventyr og sagn fra Lyngen II 09 fra Nordland (in Norwegian). H. Aschehoug & Company [W. Nygaard].
Driver, M (2018) Joik Education. Available at: https://www.merlyndriver.com/joik-education/ (Accessed: 5 June 2018)
European London 