Mats Edén, Jonas Simonson, Cikada String Quartet

Milvus is the first ECM album under the name of Mats Edén, the Swedish fiddler and composer whom Ale Möller has called the "real leader" of the Swedish folk revival. It moves from traditional polskas and tunes after old masters to Edén's own pieces, and ends with his String Quartet No. 1. The common thread is the sound of the old fiddle music, heard on the drone-fiddle he developed himself.

Edén grew up in a musical family in Värmland, the western province bordering Norway, and learned much from his stepfather, a fine fiddler. He later studied composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. With the flutist Jonas Simonson he has played since the early 1980s in Groupa, and he also works with Lena Willemark and Möller in the Nordan project. His bordunfiol, or drone-fiddle, has five sympathetic strings. The album was recorded in September 1997 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The opening Haväng, dedicated to the Indian violinist K. Shivakumar, sets Simonson's flute over the ringing drone strings. Polskas after the legendary fiddlers Ärtbergs Kalle Karlström, Lejsme Per Larsson and Olof Schyman sit beside Norafjälls, a tune after the Norwegian master Torleiv Björgum that Edén plays on viola. The two solo Variations are improvised and darker in mood, the second on violin. Simonson contributes the short solo Spillet. The quartet, about twenty minutes in three movements, is played by the Norwegian Cikada String Quartet, a group known for Lutosławski, Webern and Scelsi.

The title is the Latin name of the kite, a bird of prey that for Edén stands for freedom as it rides the air over Swedish mountain valleys. In his own note Edén writes that travelling widely and playing with all kinds of musicians led him to reflect on his own possibilities. Möller, quoted by ECM, says Edén "has created a freedom unique among fiddle players". On ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo singled out Norafjälls, played "to earthen perfection", and noted how in this music the spaces between the strings matter as much as the strings themselves.

CD, ECM 1660, first released by ECM Records in 1999.