Avant Folk with Sam Amidon and Helga Myhr

‘There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels – they’re not going to die.’
Bob Dylan

In Cecil Sharp’s collection of folk music in Appalachia (1916-18), Frode Haltli has discovered American relatives of Norwegian medieval ballads. The songs revolve around everything from sibling rivalry and knights to highway robbery and the pursuit of honour and eternal love.

In this new work, Avant Folk trails the musical family tree across the Atlantic. They are joined by American singer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon, and fiddle player and singer Helga Myhr from Hallingdal in Norway. Amidon often works with traditional American ballads, hymns, and work songs, with The New York Times writing that the musician ‘transforms all of the songs, changing their colors and loading them with trapdoors.’ Some of these songs will be heard in extended versions with Avant Folk on this concert.

Since its inception in 2017, Frode Haltli Avant Folk has played music somewhere in the triangle between jazz, contemporary music, and folk music. The collective of soloists spans generations and genres, and they have three releases under their name: Avant Folk, Avant Folk II and Avant Folk Triptyk.

‘This is Frode Haltli’s beautiful world. It combines romanticization with grittiness, moving between the church and the woods.’
– Arild R. Andersen, Jazz i Norge