Thuva Härdelin & Lelo Nika
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Thuva Härdelin & Lelo Nika

Malmö, Skåne, Sweden | INDIE

Malmö, Skåne, Sweden | INDIE
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"Songs from Hälsingland"


“Check out the subtitle! Not ”folk music” not ”tunes” but Songs from Hälsingland.This
is exactly what she does, Thuva Härdelin: she makes the fiddle sing! The tunes become
Songs. Thuva´s fiddle is so full of feelings and ambience – yes, words!”
Bengt Eriksson, Ystads Allehanda 24/2 2010
- Ystads Allehanda


"Earlier reviews on Thuva & Lelo"

Published: 2005-06-17
Blooming café offered beautiful music
Nika and Härdelin
Where: Newly opened Garden café at Sidsjön
When: Last Wednesday night
Last Wednesday was the opening night for the new Garden café at Sidsjön.
Lelo Nika and Helsinge fiddler Thuva Härdelin played the music.
Many of us had come to the blooming and dazzling Garden café to listen to the musicians and to check out the newly opened coffee shop last Wednesday.
And it was just as cosy and nice as the wonderful summer evening had promised. Lelo and Thuva, plus George Mihalache on cembalo, took us on a musical journey that made huge kick turns between Helsinge forests and Balkan.
– There is no ready made music for folk musicians deriving from as different places as Lelo and me, but music has no boundaries or limits like for instance a language has. said Thuva Härdelin.
And it was a limitless music, the audience was presented with. Without hesitation they play a polka from Gästrikland, quickly followed by romani folk music. It works ever so well. When Lelo Nika plays a captivating tune, changing his accordion into a wild organic and fire-spitting monster, Thuva Härdelin is there like St. George taming and cooling down with her beautiful and fragile violin. The couple accomplish and enrich each others music in a way that fulfills the audience.
The beautiful location of the Garden café enhances the cosy feeling that marks this night. There is something special in listening to folk music whilst looking out over the striking Sidsjön.

Reviews:
Ljusnan 26/11 2004
Virtuos folk music with hints of jazz
Långhed’s community centre lies right in the middle of the village and looks like a church, which it is of course being the former mission house. Last night Nika & Härdelin, a far-fetched as much as successful combination played their music here.
Thuva Härdelin is – as everybody in the folk music scene knows – the daughter of Thore, a real guru and fiddler of God’s or the other potentate’s grace.
Thuva moved to Malmoe, which is why she welcomed the audience with "how nice to be in Hälsingland". A good thing with Scania is, as we know, the proximity to Denmark. This is where Thuva met Lelo Nika, who grew up in Denmark but derives from Serbia. He mainly plays romani music.
"Brilliantly and masterly" – it said on the little poster near the stage in the community centre. To say the least.
When Thuva started to stroke the fiddle and Nika his concertina I was hit by a variation of folk music jazz that reminded of Hungarian/gipsy music, at the time interpreted by master musicians Jan Johansson, piano and Svend Asmussen, violin on their record jazz på ungerska (Jazz in Hungarian).
Most of the played tunes where composed by Nika. There does not exist so much ready made music for a hälsinge fiddler and Lelo Nika, Thuva explained when she presented one of the tunes.
En outstanding exception from the main repertoire of the duo was the Norwegian waltz Sjöblommen (the waterlily), as beautiful as its literal translation – seaflower.
Nika & Härdelin are in the process of preparing a record. Last Wednesday they performed in Gävle, yesterday in Långhed.
That was cool, said one of the members of Familjen West. The band consists of Daddy Niels, guitar, son Johannes and daughter Kristine, various fluites. They succeeded beautifully in warming up the audience. And tough Johannes, who was happy to be able to listen to such good music without having to go to Gävle, finished the family`s performance by saying: “By all means, stay on to listen to the others as well!”
Everybody did.
Håkan Stenberg


Hudiksvalls tidning 24/11 2004
A new and different crash
A new and different crash the numerous audience at Café August was in for last Tuesday night, when Visor&Sånt shared the stage with Hudiksvall’s jazzklubb in a combined arrangement that comprised of great, extremely differentiating music
Thuva Härdelin and Lelo Nika, she Hälsinge fiddler, he accordionist with roots in Balkan, mix their virtuous skills in a baffling folk musical meeting that makes everybody happy.
The beginning tune sounds so very Swedish – albeit its obvious attempts to more central European break-ins – and turns out to be Serbian. The rest is mainly original music composed by Lelo Nika. At times unbelievably beautiful, always interesting with its sudden breaks in both frames of mind and bars.
The harmonies are as unusual as surprisingly stunning, often melancholical. The rhythmical skiftings are the norm, and still completely unforeseeable. This music keeps you non-stop alert, unceasingly exciting, at least for fans who appreciate folk music theoretically and in principal.
In one solo, Lelo Nika does things on his accordion I did not think were possible or permitted.
Technique and speed are utterly breakneck and result in storms of rejoicing from the audience.
After the interval we land in more familiar regions. Bosse Tigrén, clarinetist from Gästrikland has gathered a group of old buddies, more than well known to the Hudiksvall audience:
Indigenous Gösta Svensson, piano, Leif Norberg , bass, Roland Bolander, drums as well as Nicke Svensson from Söderhamn, guitar. American swing jazz has been rooted in this cold hemisphere for more than half a year.
Together these gentlemen achieve a drive that can possibly be explained by the safe feeling routine instills. They can press as much as the format permits without ever exceeding the parameters, knowing that everybody involved is going to do what they are supposed to – to the very end.
Take Nicke Svensson, as impatient as ever; it simply must be possible to bend even more swing out of the guitar.
And what about Bosse Tigrén’s sensitive solo in the highest range of the clarinet in Django Reinhart’s "Nuages".
Or why not Gösta Svensson, when he puts on his tenor saxophone and with his most softest tone - accompanied by the sound of lapping up the saliva and loads of lovely side noises around the mouth-piece, just like it’s got to be – tenderly caresses the tune’s exquisite qualities in the good old "These foolish thing".
Together with the happy feeling to have been enriched with something never heard before, it is these silly little things one takes out into the cold winter’s night.
Bosse K Pettersson

Dexterous phantom elegantly matched
"Shall we play your warblers or mine?” A sensible question when two musicians with completely different playing cultures in hands meet. Fiddler Thuva
Härdelin from Hälsingland and member of a famous musical family has moved to Malmoe where she met up with accordionist Lelo Nika who has a Serbian-Yugoslavian-gipsy background. So the duo’s music is bound to become least said motley: Polish czardas, polka and quiet sweet Norwegian waltz among others. The toned down ballad of Nika’s Danish buddy Bo Stief now sounded almost like renaissance music. The two musicians vary feeling and playing method according to the sort of music they play. When it started to sound like Balkan for instance, Härdelin brought out a different, more thorough violin vibrato. To match the dexterous phantom Nika and his flabbergasting rhythmical pressure cannot be easy, but Thuva Härdelin is skilled enough to master her task elegantly.
Sydsvenska Dagbladet 23/8 2002
- Dagbladet


Discography

Thuva Härdelin, Tidernas Väg

Photos

Bio

One summer day in 1975 Thuva Härdelin unhooked her grandfather’s old halfscale fiddle
from the wall in the home of her childhood, in Delsbo, Hälsingland, Sweden.
That day was the start of a journey. A journey into the world of the polskas.
There is no beginning and no end, time is of no importance.
1800 blends with modern times instantaneously and stories about old folkmusicians, who no longer are amongst us, are mixed with stories about the still living. Here are songs for dancing and enjoyment, for reflections and for keeping the weather gods
happy.