Jazz Articles about Jukka Perko

About Jukka Perko

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
September 12, 2026

Yelena Eckemoff's Adventures of the Wildflower begins beneath the thinnest layer of perception. Its governing question concerns who receives recognition and what can survive being misread. A columbine enters the world as possibility. Decreed a weed, she later flowers beyond that verdict. Eckemoff turns this botanical fable into a meditation on exclusion and hidden continuity. Her piano supplies the narrative intelligence, lucid but never omniscient. Jarmo Saari colors the margins with guitars and theremin, then makes the glass harp speak in ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
July 15, 2021

The last time composer/pianist Yelena Eckemoff recorded in Finland she led a quintet on Blooming Tall Phlox (L&H Production, 2017). The program was devoted to smells, particularly the phlox flower and other scents remembered from childhood. Here she returns to Finland with a sextet (including several returning players, basically the entire rhythm section) and a related concept: the life cycle of a wildflower. The mood of the music is well captured in the smiling band photo on the back of ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 10, 2021

The seeds of pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff's Adventures Of The Wildflower were planted in 2013, when she traveled to Hollola, Finland, to record Blooming Tall Phlox (L&H Productions, 2017) with a group of young Finnish musicians. Several Eckemoff albums came about after that recording, but the experience with her Finnish friends must have exerted a sort of gravitational pull, and in 2019 she made a return trip to the country to team with vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, bassist Antti Lotjonen and drummer ...

Album Review

Jukka Perko Avara: Invisible Man

Read "Invisible Man" reviewed by Anthony Shaw

by Anthony Shaw
June 2, 2016

The three major names in the Finnish jazz world featured here come from three very different corners of the firmament. Jukka Perko achieved global recognition as a youth playing alto and soprano saxophone with Thelonius Monk, while guitarists Teemu Viinikainen and Jarmo Saari are better known in Scandinavia, the latter also for his proggy and pop excursions with XL Finland and Von Hertzen Brothers. Together on this disc they combine these orientations to play an assortment of self-penned and cover ...

Album Review

Jukka Perko + Iiro Rantala: It takes two to Tango

Read "It takes two to Tango" reviewed by Anthony Shaw

by Anthony Shaw
May 3, 2015

This CD from two verging-on-veteran names on the Finnish jazz scene is a little disappointing in its energy, but not in its charm. Jukka Perko and Iiro Rantala have both earned their laurels years back, playing ear-bending, exhilarating jazz, the former with the likes of Dizzey Gillespie in his 1980s line-up and later McCoy Tyner, the latter with Gil Goldstein and then his piano led Trio Töykeät. And of course both have with nearly every Finnish musician of note on ...