Winterjazz in the Baltic Sea – Jazz.com | Jazz Music – Jazz Artists – Jazz News

March 10, 2009 · 4 comments

Winterjazz in the Baltic Sea

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No jazz critic travels more miles . . . well, kilometers in this case . . . to hear new jazz than Stuart Nicholson. He has reported on jazz happenings in this column from a dozen or so countries over the last year. Now Professor Nicholson turns his attention to Åland (what, you haven't heard of Åland?), a group of islands in the Baltic Sea, and finds. . . yes, some fascinating bands. T.G.

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In February, the UK had the highest snowfall it has experienced in a decade or more. It all came as a bit of shock since global warming had produced a long succession of exceptionally mild winters. However, plenty of advance warning had been given, but London, one of the great capital cities of the world, ground to a standstill. Six centimetres of snow prevented six million Londoners from getting to work. There were no buses, no tube (the underground railway), no trains and countless roads were blocked (not just minor roads and streets but major arteries as well). The entire city had run out of grit—and a functioning transport system. Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, was closed for business for a day as runways were cleared of snow. And I was about to fly out of there 48 hours later to, er, the snow and ice of Finland.

Leaving this very British farce behind and landing in Helsinki was an eye opener. Services were unbroken, roads and pavements cleared, and life was apparently going on as normal. Finland has snow, and then some, but the nation copes. So when news reports of Britain’s plight were screened on television they were greeted by gales of disbelieving laughter by the locals. And no wonder. In Finland traffic was flowing freely and the brief journey from Helsinki airport to the city center was accomplished in 20 minutes, despite a recent heavy snowfall.

In the early evening trumpeter Verneri Pohjola launched Aurora, his debut album at the Digelius Music shop situated at Helsinki’s famous Five Corners. TV cameras, lights, the press and an expectant audience were jammed into the shop. It was quite an occasion. Pohjola has come to prominence with the Ilmiliekki Quartet, one of the leading young bands on the Finnish jazz scene (fresh out of music college they appeared at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of the Northern Lights Jazz Series in October 2006). The quartet (trumpet plus piano, bass and drums) have made two critically acclaimed albums, March of the Alpha Males (2003) and Take it With Me (2006), although Pohjola’s own album features various other combinations of instruments including strings.

At his launch he opted for a trumpet and trombone front-line plus rhythm and featured originals that spoke of folkloric influences, with a strong emphasis on elegant melodies and story-telling improvisations. His concert in miniature and simply confirmed what the locals already knew, that here was a young musician going places.

The following morning it was back to Helsinki airport to catch a flight to the island of Åland. Not many people outside of Scandinavia have heard of Åland—least of all me until recently. It’s the largest of a group of some 6,500 islands situated midway between Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea. Although the majority spoken language in Åland is Swedish, it’s an autonomous, demilitarised province of Finland with its own flag, postage stamps, political parties, a government that enacts its own laws and its own civil service—this for a population of about 27,000. The Minister of Culture is Tom Eckerman, who is also Head Librarian at the impressively modernistic library in the center of the island’s capital, Mariehamn.

And if you are an Ålander, the one thing you won’t go short of is culture. The events calendar includes international Country, Rock, Poetry, Literature, Folk, Organ, Opera, Film and Jazz festivals and that’s just for starters. I was there for Mariehamn Winter Jazz, but there is also a summer jazz festival as well. And yes, a local jazz scene too.

One of Eckerman’s duties as Culture Minister is organizing the jazz festivals, and it helps he’s a true fan of the music. And if the Winterjazz program was anything to go by, he works miracles with his small budget. Because of travel costs, he can’t cast his net much further than the Scandinavian countries, but he’s a great believer in giving youth a chance. The only name in the festival line-up was the headliner, pianist Bugge Wesseltoft from Norway.

Wesseltoft burst onto the European jazz scene at the end of the 1990s with his New Conception of Jazz, subsequently forming his own record label Jazzland, but has always been a consummate solo artist. Hunched over his keyboards, samplers and grand piano like one of Ken Russell’s mad-genius composer types, he is a master of less-is-more. Inhabiting his own sound-world of loops and samples, his hauntingly profound acoustic and electric piano lines created tapestry of sound that was both artistically and emotionally beckoning. It was all craftily underlined by a visual backdrop where the intensity and complexity of the images were programmed to respond to the on-stage sounds.

One of the most popular bands on the European underground jazz circuit is currently the Swedish band Wildbirds and Peacedrums. Comprising just a vocalist and a drummer, they are playing sold out houses across northern Europe and have released two best selling albums, Heartcore and The Snake. The trio Elifantree, runners-up in the annual Young Nordic Jazz Comets competition, come from a similar musical perspective, with vocalist Anni Elif Egecioglu from Romania (but now resident in Sweden) and Tatu Rönkkö on drums, but have gone a step further by adding the Finnish saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen. The result is a broader tonal and textural palette and a greater degree of musical options—voice and sax accompaniment, sax and voice accompaniment, melody lines in unison and harmony, the give and take of a musical duet and so on. What they have done is opened up the musical space occupied by Wildbirds and Peacedrums and taken it to another level.

Displaying a musical maturity and inventiveness well beyond their years, they have developed a cohesive ensemble identity through the deft combination of powerful individual voices. Egecioglu has developed her own vocal language—part pagan blues and part spiritual scat—and Lyytinen, a very talented young saxophonist, are strong enough musicians to thrive in this minimalistic environment and have devised seemingly limitless ways of combining voice and saxophone. Together with Rönkkö, who filled the musical spaces in a way that you didn’t yearn for a chords or bass, or indeed notice their absence, they performed a set that was as visionary as it was other- worldly.

In between each performance, as the next band set-up, DJ Marrku spun an impeccable choice of music that provided a musical bridge between each act. But even this did little to subdue the vivid impression left by Elfantree. Yet local saxophonist Edward Mattsson was unperturbed. His quintet had met as students at Fridhem Music School and they knew what they were about. In the best tradition of Newton’s Second Law of Motion—every action has an equal and opposite reaction—they produced a set that was impressive by not trying to impress. The front line of Mattsson’s saxes (either tenor or soprano) and Caroline Furbacken’s voice combined in ways that were full of subtle gestures and nuance. They drew meaning and depth from melodically suave and cunningly elliptical originals but more importantly, had their own unique sound signature.

The late night jam was by Walking Quarters, a young quartet from Helsinki comprising Alex Kalland on alto, Niklas Korhonen on piano, Aki Virta on bass and Toon Verheyen on drums. When they arrived onstage expectations were for nothing more than an amiable student jam. Kalland disabused everyone of that notion immediately. You could almost hear the sound of dropping jaws as he started to play. Close your eyes and you heard a 1950s hard bop giant, open them and there was a skinny, 5 foot 3 inch ninth grader blowing into an alto. At first it did not compute. But it turns out that young Mr. Kalland has already been earmarked by the powers that be and is being fast tracked through conservatoire, even though in his native Helsinki he’s not old enough to be served in a bar (the legal age in Europe is 18). And the rest of the band didn’t let him down. Mariehamn Winter Jazz was turning out to be something of an eye opener.

As part of the festival’s community outreach program, the following afternoon saw Ålander’s Elisabeth Ekman and Kurt Lindbom and friends give an acoustic blues concert in Mariehamn’s museum. Around the corner from a collection of stuffed birds that included pigeons, assorted seabirds and three unique species of owl, they performed versions of classic blues—albeit in Swedish. But Ekman knew her history. Her voice had an authentic grain was idiomatically spot-on, twisting and bending the Swedish language to fit into the familiar cadences of the twelve bar idiom. Lindbom was a gracious host, explaining to a broad cross section of Mariehamn’s community (mothers with toddlers to pensioners plus all stops in between) the harmonies and form at work in the idiom. The audience were transfixed—quite likely there was a spike in sales of blues CDs in the local record shop as a result.

The evening concerts began with a set from the K Trio from Iceland, who were the winners of the Young Nordic Jazz Comets competition last year. When they settled down and got away the somewhat self-conscious arty stuff, Kristján Martinsson on piano was spiky yet fluent, and ably accompanied by Pétur Siggurdsson on bass and Magnús Trygvason Elias on drums. Prone to quirky, off-center exchanges they showed plenty of promise. Yet if Elifantree, the Edward Mattsson 5 and the K Trio had one thing in common it was this: all had come together either in their teens, or at music college, and it was significant that by sticking together they had all developed a strong collective voice where the star of the show was no longer the solo as a “thing in itself” but the originality of context which in turn gave meaning to their solo expression (instead of vice versa).

Bearing in mind that Åland has a population of 27,000 you might think that when a local pianist and trumpet player decided to assemble a straight-ahead quartet for a one-off concert their set might be an excuse for an extended intermission. Not a bit of it when the pianist is the ex-pat Russian, and Ålander resident, Vladimir Shafranov. Shafranov exited the USSR via Israel and ended up on the New York scene in the late 1970s where he remained for two decades performing with the likes of Sonny Stitt, Lou Donaldson, Clifford Jordan, Ron Carter, George Mraz, Al Foster and George Coleman. Shafranov can swing and knows his way around a piano keyboard.

In New York he met his future wife, a native Ålander, and when they married they settled in Åland to raise a family. He still returns to New York for occasional gigs and tours Japan, where he has made several albums. His first touch of the piano revealed a pianist with the energy, drive and experience to lift the bassist and drummer to another level. Ålander trumpeter Fredrik Erlandsson is a well rounded musician, and studied trumpet at the Stockholm conservatoire. In the presence of a master of his craft he too grew visibility in stature with each number, but the most fascinating performance of their set was a version of “Ruby, My Dear.” What began as a tribute to Monk gradually mutated into a kaleidoscope of rich keyboard harmonies where Shafranov, an accomplished classical pianist, gave us a glimpse of his romantic Russian soul.

Teemu Viinikainen was the guitarist in the Finnish group U Street All Stars, who were signed to the European arm of Blue Note records where they recorded two albums for the label. Even back then he was a very good young guitarist but has subsequently developed into a virtuoso. Pledging allegiance to Wes Montgomery—and even sporting a rare 1948 Gibson—he’s built on Montgomery’s inspiration and now probably numbers among the top twenty jazz guitarists in the world. Pity not too many people outside of Finland have heard of him.

His trio—with Timo Hirvonen on bass and Jussi Lehtonen on drums—was not simply guitar, bass and drums, but like most of the bands that appeared at Winter Jazz, had an integrated group concept. Opening with Tango—the tango is Finland’s national dance and incredibly enjoys a bigger following than in Argentina—he performed a set that while not reaching for extremes was content to explore precisely focussed moods where intensity and rapport meant even the smallest musical gesture grew and took on a life of its own. It was a perfectly judged climax to a weekend when jazz did what it was supposed to, sound surprising. And whenever this happens, wherever you are in the world, it can be a profound experience.

This blog entry posted by Stuart Nicholson.

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