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Jarmo Saari
Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower
by Tyran Grillo
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 ...
Continue ReadingEspoo Big Band: Blood Red
by Jack Bowers
If the music on Blood Red, the eleventh album by Finland's world-class Espoo Big Band, sounds more Middle Eastern than Scandinavian, there's a reason for that. It was inspired, writes composer/arranger Mikko Hassinen, by 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's book, My Name Is Red, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul. The music “doesn't describe or explain the story or the characters," Hassinen writes. “Rather, it is a reflection of the different feelings evoked by the novel," and its lyric influences are largely ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower
by Mark Sullivan
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 ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower
by Dan McClenaghan
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 ...
Continue ReadingJarmo Saari Republic: Soldiers of Light
by Anthony Shaw
In a video introducing this band, Jarmo Saari claims that in his career as Finland's most widely-recognized modern guitarist he is maybe in the wrong niche. But listening to his latest album, and comparing it to his first releases in the mid 1990s with ZetaBoo, even if he doesn't play drums it is obvious that he is happiest when accompanying a powerful and enervated rhythm section. Whereas his early work frequently utilized Brazilian and Latin rhythms, he ...
Continue ReadingJarmo Saari Republic at G Livelab
by Anthony Shaw
Jarmo Saari Republic G Livelab Helsinki February 28, 2019 Jarmo Saari has been making music on the Nordic scene for more years than most of us care to remember. As a child he was involved in the Tapiola Choir in Espoo, the Helsinki suburb synonymous with high art of visual as well as musical nature. As an adult he has been involved with music often associated the visual, at least since his sophomore album A ...
Continue ReadingJarmo Saari's Republic at April Jazz in Tapiola, Finland
by Anthony Shaw
Jarmo Saari's Republic Louhisali April Jazz Tapiola, Espoo, Finland April 26, 2014 Spring in the north of Europe is long awaited after the long dark winter months, and with the yearly arrival of April Jazz in the eastern Helsinki suburb of Tapiola the ears of the city's musical community inevitably orientate in this direction. Every year this mini festival brings a host of American musicians for solo concerts and for late night interplay with ...
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Eero Koivistoinen
woodwindsJarmo Saari
Instrument: Guitar, electric
