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In September , Norwegian filmmaker Eivind Tolås1 and his cameraman passed by to document my radio show in a dingy, underground studio that usually smells of questionable bodily fluids and wet dog fur, somewhere in the clandestine heart of Amsterdam. I decided to spin only yodeling songs and presciently—or just coincidentally —played “Ku-Ku Jodel” by the comical and talented Norwegian duo PolkaBjørn and Kleine Heine. They’re bursting with leg-pulling talent, but, for “real” Swedish joddla, I vote for the inimitable Alice Babs. Scandinavia, clinging to the Arctic ice cap and known as the Land of the Midnight Sun, is not that odd of a place to find yodeling and indeed we find it. There is evidence of yodeling in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland—and, by extension, Siberia. Marta Ransten notes: It has always been a task for the women of Sweden and Norway to herd the cattle. They, like their mostly male counterparts in the Alps, would lead the cattle from the farm into the mountain pastures. Here among the valleys and peaks, the women would allow the cattle to roam and graze freely but under their watchful eyes. . . . In the course of their herding duties, the women developed a series of fairly sophisticated vocal signals, which they used to communicate with their herd or other herders working on distant hillside pastures. The signals which involve mostly head voice falsetto sounds . . . date probably from the Middle Ages, perhaps even earlier , and thus constitute Sweden’s oldest examples of vocal techniques and to some extent they still exist in some outlying regions of Sweden and Norway. . . . The sound was effective and loud enough to be heard for as far as km away.2 Ransten notes that these falsetto calls (joiks)3 probably varied per herder and region and behave much like yodels. Victor Grauer observed that the Pygmy/Bushmen “activate the glottal area of the voice, either through yodeling, a typical feature of Sámi joik singing, or (an) extreme glottal ‘shake,’ especially common among Siberian groups.”4 Numerous joiks are very yodel-like, while others lack that “characteristic glottal switch from head to chest voice.”5 The region’s yodels are characteristic of the seminomadic Saami (formerly Lapps or Lapplanders) and, despite the encroachments of modern life, still maintain traditional herding lifestyles. Their habitat and vocal traditions , although threatened, survive and resemble those Scan-Da-NAY-Veee-AAAH and Siiigh-ber-EEE-ah  SCANDANAYVEEEAAAH AND SIIIGHBEREEEAH  of the Inuits, while they share similar vocal techniques and a nomadic existence with the Pygmies. The Saami followed their reindeer herds, very much resembling the hunters who round up animals as depicted in prehistoric Egyptian cave drawings, before they domesticated their livestock. They often substituted vocals for horns and vice versa, creating vocalese that the herds clearly understood, which, in many ways, resembles Scotland’s mouth music (Irish lilting), which imitates the bagpipes with its rhythmic vocables and was developed after the bagpipes were banned by the British in the nineteenth century. Lomax-Grauer’s Cantometrics have traced Saami descendants out of Africa as they migrate through India, but also out and northward. Grauer notes similarities between the music of the subarctic Saami, Yukahgirs, Samoyede, and Ainu, and Pygmy styles in their “tendency to use repetitive [or nonsense] texts, wide intervals, and relaxed, relatively open voices” and “two particularly distinctive characteristics: continuous vocalizing and yodel[ing]” with their hocketing creating a veritable vocal wall of sound.6 Jazz, meanwhile, served as an exotic escape from constrictive social conventions for mid-twentieth-century Scandinavians. But it was Saami music by the “happy natural children” or “Nordic aborigines”7 that superseded the “happy-go-lucky” Negroes and whom Babs rightly heard yodeling. Her accomplished scat yodels were her link to jazz while her audiences mostly associated her yodels with the Alps. This ancient—and postmodern—fascination with exotic, nomadic tribes and their fluid transborder relations is a leap into a liberated patina of modernity via primitivism (also a Dadaist strategy) as Johan Fornäs notes: “The black jungle was one road for the aesthetic primitivists, but there are also other primitive roots to choose between. The Austrian yodeler and joiking Saami were just two such examples.” This welding of the “familiar exoticism” of yodeling with jazz at pop music’s juncture “implied not only globalization but also a strategy • Spooks Spies and Spunky Ululations—Yodeling and Short-Wave Espionage. Out of...

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