This CD documents a project in which I wanted to bring together the Finnish folk singer extraordinaire Anna-Kaisa Liedes and violinist Wendy Ultan from New York. I was right: these ladies cook together! The music is freely improvised, and at least to my own ears somewhat more rootsy than avant-garde, while nevertheless mixing influences from Sami yoik and West-African rhythms to 20th century art music and free jazz. Wendy's description is pretty apt, and roughly as follows: her own musical function is here to open an environment in which "the trickster" (Erkki) may do his tricks so that the soulful plant of Anna-Kaisa's voice can grow and thrive. In other words, this is a band in which Wendy's violin provides constantly shifting backgrounds for my color splashes and Anna-Kaisa's deep expression.

Instabilitrio: Oh God, Don't Let Me Die In a Place Like This. Heartbreaker Productions HBPCD-002 (2012).

This is a free jazz trio with the saxophonists Scott Currie (Minneapolis) and Edward Schneider (New York). The basic idea of the band is simple: reduce the rhythm section of a free jazz ensemble to a guitar/organ pedal combination (that's me), and construct an expanded soloist  from two simultaneously playing alto saxes. This is the most free-jazzy of my CDs, and it does also contain some of my harmonica hyperventilations (creating a nice contrast with Scott's baritone sax).

 

 

Blow-Fi: Iloinen Evoluutio. Heartbreaker Productions HBPCD-001 (2012).

My improvisational collaboration with speech and video artist Ville Kiiski begun already in 1994, and for many years, we managed to remain amazingly active in our private workshops while remaining amazingly inactive in public. In the 2000s, our project Blow-Fi has, in the main, concentrated on video art productions, and thus our first audio CD had to keep brewing for over 17 years before publication. This CD, the title of which translates as "Merry Evolution" (or, more to the point with a Nietzschean hint, as "The Gay Evolution"), collects some of the fruits from our "Midwest Project" in which the core duo is complemented with a cast of Minnesotan musicians including the incomparable Milo Fine (see below), harmonica ace Clint Hoover (with his first-ever published recordings on the theremin!), an impovising vocal quartet, and more. Most of all, however, it is great to finally present in a straighforward audio format the improvised speech of Ville Kiiski which might be stylistically described by thinking what it would have sounded like if the improvisation-loving beat poets of the 1950s would have actually focused on improvising in speech.

 

 

 

For more on Milo's music, see:

 

Peppe Jalava Band: Go to the Beach. Alba Records ABCD 304 (2010).

Before leaving Finland, I was a member of the composer Pertti "Peppe" Jalava's jazz group. This CD presents Peppe's Zappa-esque visions, colliding the modernism of art music with progressive rock and jazz. I'm playing chromatic harmonica and guitar here. The CD can be acquired here: