Jussi Reijonen: Sayr: Kaiho--Live In Helsinki

Finnish-born guitarist Jussi Reijonen says, "For there to be motion, there needs to be stillness as its counterpoint and vice versa, since through their dance, each defines the other."

Music unfolds over time. Reijonen has released a pair of albums in 2025: Sayr: Salt | Thirst (Unmusic)—a studio solo set employing a late—1940s Gibson LG-2—and now Sayr: Kaiho: Live In Helsinki, with the Arabic oud trading places for the guitar at times. Both sets are deep immersions into stillness, slowing motion to a near standstill. They are both as introspective and inward as anything guitarist Pat Metheny may have recorded solo in his hotel rooms after his shows. Time has gone into another dimension as Reijonen draws from his stringed instruments the sound of a rawness, the sound of cold brown earth. It is not, of course, a complete stillness, but it is like watching a clock's minute hand creep, or the movement of tectonic plates. These are sounds that emerge from a windless alpine forest in winter's early twilight, or from an expanse of flat desert at dawn during a cold February morning.

Reijonen has rambled (as your favorite bluemsan might say), but he hails originally from a small city above the Arctic Circle, pitching his tents over time in Northern Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, Lebanon and the United States. All of these locales influenced his music. These fully improvised creations follow unforeseen paths, navigating what Reijonen calls his "memory palace."

He has cited—among many other sources—Lightnin' Hopkins as an influence. This is apt. He could have as credibly mentioned the early guitar work of bluesman Muddy Waters or early Howlin' Wolf—before Wolf turned those guitar duties over to Hubert Sumlin. The sound is unrefined, like something growling out of a shotgun shack in the Mississippi delta. You hear it from a distance, as you drive by on Highway 61. Maybe Reijonen's decade-plus in the United States brought the blues his way. If so, it is a lonely blues—a man with his guitar immersing himself in his instrument as he searches for elusive truths.