Who was/is Dragseth Duo ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Dragseth Duo
"Lyrics, music and interpretation form a unity, sympathetic, friendly, completely free of romanticizing nostalgia, also of any Germanism, but also creating a pleasant counterweight to the ever more uniform American pop dude". (Thomas Rothschild)
At the Husumer Zingelschleuse lies Dragseth's Gasthof since 1584. The restaurant named after his landlord was the favourite pub of Manuel Knortz and Kalle Johannsen. There they gave their first concert together. So it was only natural to name yourself after the old inn. Before her time as Dragseth Duo, Knortz had an Irish-Scottish folk band, and Johannsen played in a German folk band. The first impulse to deal with one's own dialect - so Kalle Johannsen to the 'Folker!' - came from a native of Bielefeld. "It was like a revelation when Hannes Wader released his LP 'Plattdeutsche Lieder' in 1974. He sang our songs, which I still knew from my childhood! I thought to myself, 'My God, why don't we sing it?' First someone had to come from the Teutoburg Forest and give us the impulse to do something like that ourselves!" The right impulse to sing in Low German, however, came essentially from Helmut Debus. "When I first heard it, I thought, 'My God, that's how Low German sounds.' After that, the direction was set for us."
The first program of the duo consisted of traditional songs. "And we have set old lyrics to music or interpreted finished songs. Of course we also set Klaus Groth to music, which is what everyone who wants to get into the Low German scene and do their own things did. But we also sang classics like 'De Moel', which we took over from Wader. And then he wrote his first own songs, inspired by Klaus Groth."
After their record debut 'Vundaag' in 1987 the Dragseth Duo released songs after Theodor Storm poems on their follow-up album 'Es ist ein Flüstern'. "At that time we also began to write our own songs," says Knortz. "From then on it really started: Sometimes I had written a song, sometimes Kalle had one. That went really fast" ('Folker!' 3/2006). The local colour of the song Promenade written by Manuel Knortz for the LP 'Lichtjahre', released in 1991, is provided by the Kurpromenade of the island of Föhr in autumn: "Liebste has disappeared with the last steamer, the poet could of course have sailed back with the next straightaway, but prefers to leave it there and remains in songlike melancholy in the slipstream of the orchestra pavilion ...".
"Both duo members prove to be exquisite singers, one sounding like the better Hannes Wader (without his exaggerated timbre), and the two voices complement each other wonderfully. Manuel Knortz and Kalle Johannsen managed the feat of finding a relaxed approach to the poetry of the great Low German poet Theodor Storm. Also her own Platt- and High German songs as well as lyrics of well-known songs (François Villon, Don McLean, William Butler Yeats, Jacques Brel) in partly own settings convince" (Ulrich Joosten in 'Folker!' 5/2004).
www.atelier-knortz.de/folkmusik.html
Extract from
Various - songwriter in Germany
Vol.3, For whom we sing (3-CD)
/various-songwriter-in-Germany-vol.3-for-who-who-we-sing-3-cd.html
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