Ale Möller

While Ale Möller is one of the pillars of the modern Swedish folk music, he came to it via a roundabout journey, namely through Greece. In his early years, Möller was a jazz follower and played trumpet, but he became infatuated with rembetika after meeting a Greek musician living in Sweden. Möller studied the bouzouki for a number of years in Greece, but came to the conclusion that he needed to study the music of his own people.

Holing up in Dalarna, a Swedish province known for its strong folk-music tradition, Möller eventually switched to the mandola and began exploring Swedish traditional music. Despite being told repeatedly that he needed to play fiddle to play Swedish folk music, he slowly tinkered with the mandola, adding frets so he could play quartertones, enabling him to play Swedish music appropriately. In addition, he became adept at a number of instruments, including flutes, hammer dulcimer and harp. He is credited with single-handedly creating a "bouzouki tradition" in Sweden with his use of the Irish and Greek versions of that stringed instrument over the last 20 years.

In 1987, he helped form the seminal folk band Frifot with two other important members of the neotraditional movement, singer-fiddler Lena Willemark and fiddler and bagpiper Per Gudmundson. Their work together as the Nordan Project also helped bring to light the Swedish medieval ballad tradition, as well as pushing the field into more improvisation. Möller has also become well known for incorporating outside influences into Swedish music.

Möller has had a long-running partnership with Aly Bain, a fiddler from the Shetland Islands. The duo's sets jumped back and forth between their respective cultures, exploring the musical links between Scandinavian and Celtic traditions. He also began to work with immigrant musicians who had settled in Sweden. At the 2002 Falun Folk Festival, he created the World Heritage Orchestra, weaving together music as disparate as belly dance and rap. —Marty Lipp