Songbook: ‘Oldenfjord’ with Sam Amidon and Grey Larsen

Sam Amidon is feeling nostalgic. He’s thinking about a recent visit with his old friend Gerry Fialka in Los Angeles. Amidon was there recording his new album, Salt River, in Venice Beach with longtime collaborator Sam Gendel, and Fialka had just finished a 28-year journey reading James Joyce’s mercurial masterpiece – Finnegans Wake – aloud in his book club. “I saw Gerry and he was very upset”, Amidon remembers, “because The New York Times said they got to the end, and he said, ‘Finnegans Wake has no end. It’s circular in structure.’ So why were they making a big deal of the fact that he finished it?” This circular nature, moving far away in exploration and then returning to the source, is a handy way to look at Amidon’s work.

He grew up deep in the trad world of New England, with parents who were members of a rogue community theatre troupe and shape note enthusiasts. He started on the fiddle at the age of three and formed a teenage contra dance band, Popcorn Behavior, that toured to acclaim. “I was lucky to be in the middle of a really rich world of traditional folk music”, Amidon says, “but as a listener, I was trying to expand outward. It was a pretty random process, because my friend Thomas [Bartlett] and I would just get whatever CDs we saw at our local CD store and have our minds blown. But that was based on, you know, when you had 15 dollars to spend. It was much, much harder to discover music in those days.”

At a small folk festival, Swan’s Island in Maine, an encounter with Fialka changed Amidon’s life. “He saw me in the back of my car with these Miles Davis 70s ‘electric Miles’ and Albert Ayler records. And he’s like, ‘Wow, you’re doing some heavy listening, man.’ So, over the course of that week, Gerry was turning me onto all these different things and telling me about everything”. Fialka introduced Amidon to outsider artists like The Shaggs and Conlon Nancarrow, and free jazz greats like Sonny Sharrock and Ornette Coleman. Today, Amidon blends the most traditional music with avant-garde and free jazz ideas, but much of that comes from these early sonic explorations.

Salt River features covers of Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and Coleman, but opens with a beautiful rendition of an instrumental tune, ‘Oldenfjord’. If you crate dig for old folk LPs in the US, you’ll know the tune’s composer, New England folk musician Grey Larsen. Both his solo album, The Gathering (1986), which this tune comes from, and his work with the band Metamora are well represented in dusty stacks. Amidon grew up idolising Larsen, both for his work with Metamora, but also for Larsen’s seminal album, The Orange Tree, with Québécois musician André Marchand of La Bottine Souriante. “It’s one of my favourite albums of all time, still is”, Amidon says. At Gendel’s in Los Angeles, ‘Oldenfjord’ just popped into Amidon’s memory fully formed. “I love its looping, circular, folding melody, where it just keeps on folding back on itself.”

Larsen wrote ‘Oldenfjord’ in 1981 after an inspiring visit to Norway to study Hardanger fiddle and look for his family roots. His great-great grandmother was an Olden, so he travelled to the west coast of Trondheim looking for relatives. He tracked them down on the shores of a fjord called ‘Oldenfjord’, named for his family, and spent a week visiting and playing tunes. “The small ancestral family farm was right on the shore of that lovely fjord, and I pictured that farm in my mind when I composed this piece of music, as well as the ocean and mountains surrounding the fjord,” Larsen says.

Back to Amidon’s version, and Gendel was in the studio working on the tune with vintage synthesizers and MIDI. For Amidon, that harkened back to obscure New England folk albums from the 80s that also used synths in creative ways. “It wasn’t a big movement or anything,” he says, “but it was just a few people like Larsen, Pete Sutherland with his album Mountain Hornpipe, The Horse Flies with their album Human Fly… they were making traditional records, but they were allowing in the influence of the moment, which was like New Age music and Talking Heads and Steve Reich and synthesizers.”

On ‘Oldenfjord’, guitar lines interweave, holding the centre steady around Larsen’s melody. They turn around each other, buoyed by Gendel’s saxophone and synth basslines. For an artist defined by circles, by his constant return to and departure from the source, ‘Oldenfjord’ is a map for the beginning, the ending, and the beginning again, of Sam Amidon.