Telakka Jazz 2025: Finland’s Second City Gets Spiritual

Telakka Jazz 2025
Ravintola Telakka
Tampere, Finland
January 3-4, 2025

"Tampere is the heart of the Finnish jazz scene," a Helsinki record shop clerk proudly told me, when I announced I was heading north for the former, smaller city's Telakka Jazz fest. "In that case, Helsinki is the head," another hip capital dweller would retort, when I repeated this claim a day later.

You would be forgiven for expecting a healthy rivalry to exist between Finland's two most populous cities (sorry Espoo), but separated by barely 100 miles (180km), there is too much musical intermingling—and probably not enough of a national scene—to hold grudges for long. This was wildly evident at Telakka Jazz, described as a "nice little festival by local jazz forces" by another industry type I quizzed, before braving the snow.

It takes a certain sense of security to program a two-day jazz festival at which you headline, twice, but this was the case with drummer/promoter Janne Tuomi—who closed both nights of what might be the venue's sixth annual shindig (he has not kept count) with groups he is a member of. Yet these two distinct projects were the blazing finales and highlights of the weekend—and that throws zero shade on the four other acts programmed.

With nothing resembling a blues, ballad, or standard in sight, Telakka Jazz welcomed six free, experimental and/or spiritual-leaning groups to the invitingly artsy stage found inside a red-brick former dock building. In egalitarian Nordic style, all sets were one hour—although day-two closers Tahmela Six did sneak a cheeky encore. Named for the woodland suburb where they recorded their debut album Mount—in a single day, barely a year earlier—the sextet wove a deep, soulful spell, the set opening with a thrilling 33-minute improvised suite weaving through elements of the album's title track. With an open-hearted spiritual aesthetic, filtered through a rustic, folkish sensibility, this was music of space and shape, of winding improvisations in collision and cohort.

Bassist Eero Tikkanen drove a steady but searching pulse, danced over by our host Tuomi's insistent stick work. Up front, the triple horn section brayed against one another like a bag of fighting cats—brash ballsy trumpeter Eero Savela blowing against Black Motor and Hot Heroes mainstay Sami Sippola's wildman tenor; nuanced alto player Otto Eskelinen's periodic switches to flute and shakuhachi lent mellower passages much of their rustic charm. Ragged, rockish guitarist Topias Tiheäsalo is the cowboy in the forest, splaying stacks of chiming chords and darting bluesy runs amid the rhythmic churn, too angular and angry for the pastoral mood, but never short of thrilling. Perhaps it should not work—but it definitely should not have people dancing in the aisles like this.

A day earlier, Tuomi again took the spotlight for the premiere of Hatka, a brazen, new free-improv trio alongside feted British saxophone maverick (and Derek Bailey and Peter Brötzmann cohort) Alan Wilkinson and American bassist Darin Gray (self-described everywhere as Sonic Youth sideman "Jim O'Rourke's go-to bassist for over 25 years"). The set was, naturally, nothing short of explosive, blazing into a violent opening improvisation which did not let up for breath until 40 minutes later. Describing this music would be like trying to catch bullets in your teeth, and spit them out onto a plate (to paraphrase something the great jazz writer Kevin Le Gendre once told me)—so fresh and feisty, so full of power, tumult and tenderness, that it was. There was something animalistic in the air—not just in Wilkinson's guttural cries, squawks and screams, with and without a horn in his mouth; not just in the birdlike sounds Gray provoked, probing and pounding his strings with metal picks, wooden sticks and plastic tubing; nor Tuomi's shamanic bell-ringing—but in the whole hungry feast of it, the sense of spectacle and worship alike. Two days later the band went into the studio to record a debut that we are waiting for with bated breath.

Both nights opened with a new, unrecorded and bold experimental act. Billed as Kääriäinen-Hyvärinen, the duo of guitarists Jukka Kääriäinen and Lauri Hyvärinen served a bracing sonic slap in the face. Sporting twin Jazzmaster/Jaguar-style guitars—the noise-makers' six-string weapon of choice—and dancing between effects pedals, the pair intuitively conjured dense drones and ethereal shivers, demented shredding and holy feedback. Whiddling whammy bars and scraping violin bows, detuning and bashing strings with simultaneous abandon and control. Noise? Contemporary? Experimental? Call it what you want, as an audio/physical live spectacle it was riveting to witness ... and will likely prove unlistenable on record.

Better known as leader of prog-ish outfit Utopianisti, multi-instrumentalist Markus Pajakkala presented a new (and apparently largely off-the-cuff), tech-heavy solo set, with varying results. There were two main configurations: in the first, Pajakkala triggered droning synth chords with his feet while performing searching reed solos, haphazardly palming some wind chimes for added ethereality; the second saw him looping live drums, keys, horns, and occasional misjudged vocals—layered rhythmic refrains, rubbing against each other to abstraction, playing over himself rather than against or alongside others. At times it was engaging, others middling—watching the confused conjurer wander the stage, shuffling post-it notes of scribbled patches and presets, it appeared the artist had been imprisoned, rather than set free, by his own tech wizardry. After he closed by dancing off the stage in an animal mask, a friend told me the music made her see things. What things? "My own funeral."

By contrast, the easiest thing on the ear all weekend was the Antila-Sauros Wonderful Quartet, another new, undocumented outfit who performed a warm, swinging set of modal jazz that was skillfully executed but lent closest to expectations. The co-leaders—keys and vibraphonist Mikko Antila and multi-reeds player Adele Sauros—dealt some assured solos in a slow-burn set which, while a push to call "wonderful," was solidly enjoyable nonetheless.

In the same middle slot a night earlier came established collective Oiro Pena, led by drummer/composer Antti Vauhkonen, whose meandering expositions took on the disparate flavours of its apparently rotating cast of members. Again heavily indebted to the spiritual jazz of the '70s, there was an inclusive sense of swing in the bottom end, a feel of funk in the raindrops of Fender Rhodes, and a free-jazz abandon in the soaring sax and violin solos. Most beyond-the-norm were the three-part vocal refrains, delivered by two female voices and the leader himself: "Give me the strength to understand / Give me the strength to love," ran the rousing closer, in Finnish. A fittingly fair-weather finale, and a classic case of the whole outweighing its constituent elements.

There was however a seventh performer in the room. The British visual artist Gina Southgate set up a make-shift easel for the latter two performances on both nights of the festival, knocking out a steady stream of canvases on the spot (viewable in the gallery above). It was a thrill to watch her work, to witness sound and motion be transformed into a static visualisation in real time, a memory both clearer and more hazy than this review can ever hope to be.

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