Rejuvenating Rock and Roll

Amalshan GUNERATHNE

Shying away from mechanical rhythms of contemporary music, they uplift your fatigued hearts with refreshingly exuberant tunes that leave your hearts with a sense of juvenile excitement. Sticking to music at its purest form, they feed your wearied soul with jovial rhythms that can lift up your spirits. “Our genre of music is basic, simple and it hits people’s hearts. No matter where you are, whether you are on beach, theater or in street corner, the kind of music that we perform has the ability to hit people’s hearts and lighten up their spirits,” they say.

The Norwegian trio, Nils Christian, Hans Martin and Mattis Myrland, or ‘Lucky 3’ as they call themselves, has taken up the task to rejuvenate rural American harmony singing with a sense of uniqueness known to their own. Accompanied by their banjo and guitar, the trio visited the island recently and treated locals with an adventurous old-American Bluegrass musical experience that left many hearts in buoyant ecstasy. “It is the music of my grandparents. It is like the grand-father of rock and roll. This is what came before hip-hop or pop music. It is like the pop music in 1930s,” Hans says.

However, according to Nils, there is more to bluegrass music than just happy tunes. The cheerful music fused with simple and genuine lyrics have the capacity to touch the audience’s soul with a sense of frankness which is unique to the genre. “The richness lies in simplicity. Music sounds really happy, but lyrics can be really tragic. It can be about a killing, a heartbreak, death, but music is very up tempo and jovial, core of the music style is the contrast between happiness and the tragedy. You tell a sad story, but you do it in a brave way,” Hans explains.

Their love for old-American harmony singing and bluegrass genre stems way back to their younger days. Going back through the memory lane on how he fell in love with the genre, Mattis recalls, “My grandmother used to sing these long songs, they have ten, twelve verses. They are ballad like stories, about poor people and they always end in a horrible way. There is some kind of salvation there, there is a religious undertone and there is a tragic side of it, but the tune is very jolly and true to the heart and it was easy to fell in love with it.”

They also strongly believe that even amidst the growing popularity of hip-hop, techno and modern pop culture, the traditional styles like American country music could still hold its place and draw young people towards the genre. “Hip-hop and R & B styles are popular among kids and teenagers, but lots of people are tired of it and they are searching for something acoustic and refreshing, and that is what we offer through our genre,” Hans comments.

The trio also believes in delivering the old American style with its purest and most original form. While they have written and composed few of their own creations, they firmly believe that there is enough material in traditional content which they can harness and exploit for their musical purposes. The idea is to carry the traditional content to the modern audience. “Some of the tunes we play are 150 years old. There are so much wonderful stuff in original, traditional material that we have been occupied with doing research on those traditional content and using those content for our performances. It is foolish to write something new, when there are so much great material that people don’t know, Our goal is to get in to the genre, rather than combine it with lots of other genres, it is refreshing, because there is so much we can do with it. We are not from Kentucky, we are not Americans from thirties, we just want to be true to the music and see what comes after that,” Nils eloquently explains.

Lucky 3’s visit to Sri Lanka was organized by Sewalanka Foundation together with Concerts Norway, Aru Sri Art Theatre and the Norwegian Embassy. They performed with local choir group ‘Soul Sounds’, directed by Soundarie David. Speaking of their visit to the country, they commented, “When we were invited, we felt very excited about coming to Sri Lanka and experience how is the reaction to our music in the other side of the world.

A Norwegian group performing old American music in Sri Lanka; is a weird image in a way, but responses for our performances were great. Performing alongside local choir was also a novel experience; we sang some popular Sinhalese songs as well like ‘Danno Budunge’.”