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Wanderlust
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To accompany Greenland musically, I went looking for suitable music and didn’t find much. This is not surprising, because only 65,000 people live in Greenland and around 15 music albums are produced in one year. Most of them in the native language. But my search was not without result: „Nanook“ is a term from Inuit mythology and means something like „mighty polar bear“. And that’s also what this song is about: how the ice melt threatens the habitat of the Nanook.
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Very cool, Juergen! I would have gone to my grave not realizing that music is being written and performed in Greenland. I guess I’m stuck in a time warp where everyone there is engaged in subsistence fishing and just trying to keep warm.
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Yes David, Greenland seems to have an amazing variety of music considering the small population.
Nive Nielsen, an Inuk from Nuuk, is a Greenlandic singer-songwriter and an actress. She plays with her band „The Deer Children“, often using a little red ukulele, which kickstarted her music career. The first concert she played was for Margrethe II of Denmark. Wonderful indie folk with a very original touch. The songs are about love, reindeer, pirates, ghosts and coffee.
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I had posted this video before, but I find the landscape shots so impressive that I like to show it again here:
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Juergen,
this is sad. But thanks for posting this.
Your travelling thread is up to 14 pages. There ought to be an award.
I hope to visit Greenland – while it’s still white.
Maybe i’ll say more later. Cheers
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Really beautiful video Juergen. Simply amazing what we don’t ever see up close.
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“Go out into the world. It is more amazing than any dream.”
-Ray Bradbury-
Thanks Tom and Dave for your feedback! From Greenland to Iceland it is only a short hop. The island made of fire and ice. This is what the birth of Iceland may have looked like many millions of years ago:
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And that’s how impressive the landscape looks today:
By the way: Iceland is an island country in the extreme northwest of Europe. With around 103,000 square kilometers, Iceland is the second largest island country in Europe after the United Kingdom. The main island is the largest volcanic island on earth and is located just south of the Arctic Circle.
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Music will always be inspired by the environment in which it is created. Iceland has a lot to offer scenically with its incredible variety of very different landscapes, ranging from white glaciers to volcanic bizarreness, moss-green bubble fields, deep fjords and frost-cracked mountains to black beaches. Charismatic like the band SÓLSTAFIR, which means something like „spreading sunbeams“. The following song is about lost love, separation and loss:
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I enjoyed watching grizzly bears fishing for salmon in the Brooks Falls bear country in Alaska, near Anchorage. Quite fascinating to see so many brown bears in one place. They have a live bear cam going most of the year, currently turned off during the off season hibernation period for the bears. This is a footage from the fall.
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A Bear trivia:
What’s a bear 🐻 with no ear’s?
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…Bee’s.🐝 😁
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Nice Dad joke. Did you hear they are not making twelve inch rulers any longer?
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Oh, boy, here we go…
“I haven’t slept for ten days. Because that would be too long.” (Mitch Hedberg)
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Thanks guys. Since I’m not particularly good at keeping jokes and I’m even worse at telling, I got some help from two bearish full professionals:
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Hi Jung,
thanks for your „bear tour“ to Alaska. I didn’t know there was a grizzly bear live cam, but it doesn’t surprise me either. From afar they look kind of cute and snug. Until they start moving. Interesting that they appear in such large groups at dinner when you consider that they are actually loners. Alaska seems to have stunning scenery.
“There are only two ways to look at the world: either you believe that nothing in the world is a miracle, or you believe that there are only miracles”
– Albert Einstein –
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I haven’t found any music that is typical for Alaska. Maybe someone here in the forum has a nice one about it. But there are quite a few bands that come from Alaska or at least started their career there, such as the band „Bearfoot“ that was formed in Alaska in 1999 as „Bearfoot Bluegrass“.
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There are also a number of songs that deal with Alaska or at least have the name Alaska in the title. Like this one for example. Can you think of any nice songs or ideas about Alaska?
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Hi Jurgen
Thanks for the Alaska videos. That first one brings fond memories of my 3 Alaska cruises I took. As we have a big cruise ship industry here with a cruise ship terminal right in the harbour in Vancouver, it’s been fairly affordable and easy to hop onto an Alaska cruise. I literally just take the skytrain (subway) from near my place right down to the harbour and walk a couple hundred meters to the cruise ship, and then a week or so later walk back from the cruise ship to the subway back home. No connecting flights etc to get to the cruise ship.
Anyway it is a beautiful 7 days cruise up the inner passage to Alaska, with most of the cruise going along a passage with land on both sides with a lot of wildlife and mountain scenery.
On all 3 trips, my favourite part was standing on the deck looking at the glaciers in Glacier Bay. I felt a spiritual aspect to it, because you are standing in front of a glacier with glacial ice formed tens of thousands of years ago, and I am witnessing massive chunks of ice falling into the ocean and transforming from ice to water again, after 10, 20, 30 thousand years. It feels like a circle of life as the ice transforms to water and becomes a part of the ocean, and some evaporates into the atmosphere, and some freeze and fall back onto the glacier as snow high up in the mountains, and becomes a part of the glacier again, and then repeats….Well climate change might change all that as all the Alaskan Glaciers are slowly disappearing now. It’s easy to contemplate life and death, and how the circle of life happens watching geologic events as ice, tens of thousands of years old reach the final leg of it’s journey and slide into the ocean. The glacier doesn’t die, but transforms into another state.
Anyway, it is so peaceful there in front of the Glacier. The water is absolutely calm, and occasionally you hear a large snap and crack and a hush as a large piece of ice falls into the ocean. If you could disembark and float in front of the glacier in the bay overnight in a small boat or canoe, it would be amazing.
If you want to hear what it sounds like when the ice breaks, you can listen at this website article: The Ice Is Talking..
In regards to Alaska music, for me MLT’s 2007 Concert album was my Alaska cruise soundtrack. I sat out on the deck for many hours watching Alaska unfold listening to the album with headphones on. When I hear “Aufsteh’n”, I some times visualize a glacier or icy mountain range. LOL 😁 Fond beautiful memories.
Here are some photos I took from my last May 2019 Alaska cruise.
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Hi Jung,
many thanks for your very detailed and loving travel report to Alaska. The cruises are really comfortable for you. Enviable. With us, round trips by ship usually start in Hamburg or you first have to get on a plane to find a suitable port. Your variant is great: grab the luggage trolley, just walk over there and get on. Let’s go 😀 And while you captured the natural beauties above the water with your camera (thanks for the impressing pics), there was an equally wonderful, mysterious world beneath your feet without you probably noticing it:
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Hi Jurgen, thanks for that beautiful video. There are some intriguing creatures under the ocean in Alaska, like that red fish with bulging eyes. On the next Alaska Cruise I think I will do a one way up to Anchorage and then explore the parks up there, and take a boat cruise to explore some of the ocean wildlife to, I am sure lots of whales.
On a side note Alaska is also well know for King Crabs. I remember years ago experiencing these massive Alaskan King Crab legs in one of the well know Seattle seafood restaurants. The legs were so huge, you get full on just the crab legs alone. 😀
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Hi Jung
thanks for the beautiful Alaska piano music. You will definitely like whale watching. The humpback whales in Alaska are quite famous. It is an awe-inspiring experience when these giants of the sea rise out of the water and leave their wet element to breathe or to hunt fishes. You might even be able to take a few nice snapshots. I’m an enthusiastic landscape and nature photographer and used to my subject holding still. Animal photography is not really my cup of tea: the animals are usually too fast and I’m much too slow. An extremely unfavorable constellation. And I don’t enjoy hammering out serial images. Oh, and it’s best to choose a small boat, otherwise you won’t see much except for the backs and heads of other tourists and upstretched arms with cameras. Here are my attempts to capture whales and dolphins (after the heads and upraised arms have disappeared and the whales too….):
PS: Yes, king crabs are real monsters. I think the legs and claws are also the only edible parts. So how did you get the shell open? With your hands or with special tools?
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This is the only song I can think of offhand about Alaska:
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Hi David,
thanks for the music track. Unfortunately Johnny Horton doesn’t ring a bell. Judging by the picture and the musical style, the track was produced sometime in the 50’s?
The BeeGees once took the road to Alaska (and sound surprisingly mature):
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Hey, Juergen.
That song is from 1960. The only other song of his I know is The Battle of New Orleans (“In 1814 we took a little trip…”). I just looked him up and saw that he also had a number-one song on the country charts called When It’s Springtime in Alaska.
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Ah….good ol Johnny Horton stuff ….I grew up listening to his stuff….I enjoy it my parents , being both country music fans mostly, well my late Dad & also into Blue Grass and was, while my late Mom had a more varied musical taste , loved Elvis, Connie Francis, old school country (Patsy Cline, etc ), Big Band stuff , whatever she enjoyed singing and dancing too , is what she enjoyed, I’ve truly inherited that musical tastes trait from her…lol… but the one and only dong they both jointly enjoyed and publicly dance to , and was also Dad’s funeral song we chose ….Tom Jones ‘ version of ” Green Green Grass of Home “
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Hi David and Jacki,
thanks for your posting. As far as I know, Johnny Horton was largely unknown to us. This is probably due to the fact that country music leads here an exotic shadowy existence and somehow doesn’t fit our lifestyle. Johnny Cash and John Denver are well known and perhaps a few others as well, but that’s it. Interestingly, quite a few songs about Alaska are in country style: it must have something to do with the idea of infinite vastness, long roads leading through untouched nature somewhere into nowhere. But you can certainly explain it better.
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Ian Anderson describes his own idea of wanderlust in the song “Far Alaska“: imagining a journey to far-off lands from Rio to Alaska and he encourages the listener to do the same: “Pick a place or stick a pin in“
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