Nordic Choro

Some weeks ago my good friend, Hans, forwarded a link to the inserted video below as a kind gesture according my birthday - enjoy this performance of a tune titled "Happy Birthday To Me"



The composer of this tune is Jarmo Romppanen, who plays the bandolim in the video and is the main soloist in the trio that is officially named Nordic Choro. The Nordic Choro trio is from Finland, Scandinavia, and the ensemble has a profile on MySpace including video performance and audio files of some of the music played by the group, most of it composed by Jarmo Romppanen, who also has a website about his various projects here. - Nordic Choro was founded in the Autumn of 2008 and consists of Jarmo Romppanen (10-string bandolim), Anders Perander (percussions, cavaquinho, banjo) and Fabio de Oliveira (7-string guitar).The repertoire of the ensemble consists mainly of contemporary compositions by Jarmo Romppanen. According to the info of the group-profile, Jarmo has been inspired by Brazilian choro music and musicians, and also influenced by nordic folk-fiddle styles. In the profile of Nordic Choro Jarmo also points to the background of the trio, quote: "If choro music would have been born in the Nordic countries in the late 19th century, it might be sounding like this at the beginning of the 21st. However – excepting the European ones – we didn´t have the same influences here in the North, so this is just a vision and nordic choro is an imaginary genre. Nonetheless, the group Nordic Choro is a real representative of the genre and there is no need to be too serious about different music styles. After all, music is for playing ;-)"

I really like the music played by the Nordic Choro trio, a positive surprise addition to the choro genre with a Nordic folkmusic-touch played by devoted and highly skilled musicians. The trio has just released their debut cd that I should like to have and review later; links to online-retailers of the cd are notated at the MySpace profile of Nordic Choro.

To give you further impressions of the music played by Nordic Choro, I'll insert a couple more of the videos uploaded at YouTube recorded during a live performance of the trio in April 2009 at the Sibelius Academy (Helsinki, Finland). Here is a performance of another composition by Jarmo Romppanen, "Backas the better"



The next tune is also composed by Jarmo Romppanen, "Safe & warm"



Finally, to end this small presentation of Nordic Choro, here is a performance of a composition by the Brasilian 7-string guitarist of the trio, Fabio de Oliveira - the title is "Atras do Prejuizo"



Jo