Verneri Pohjola photographed by Maarit Kytöharju.
It’s not often that you interview a jazz trumpeter in a Thai restaurant in a bus station shopping centre and he calmly points out that his music his playing in the background, but it may say something about Verneri Pohjola’ status in his native Finland. He’ on his way to a rehearsal with his bass player, Antti Lötjönen, who is also part of the long-standing Five Corners quintet, with whom he plays in the Ilmielkki Quartet, which he founded in 2002, and in the same year won the first prize in the Young Nordic Jazz Comets competition. The son of Pekka Pohjola, a bass player who came of age during prog rock in the 1970s, Pohjola was awarded the coveted Teosto award for original compositions on the quartet’s 2003 debut March of The Alpha Males. The following year he was awarded Young Artist of the Year at the Pori Jazz Festival. In the same year the Finnish jazz critics declared him the Best Trumpeter and Musician of the Year. More recently he’ been a guest at the London Jazz festival in 2012 and 2013.
The Ilmiliekki Quartet, whose name means “full blaze’, or “fire-igniting spark’, has also toured Australia twice, first in 2008 for the Wangaratta Jazz Festival, and then again in 2011. This was a whirlwind tour of 9 days, 19 flights, taking in the Queensland Jazz festival, Devonport Jazz Festival in Tasmania, Bennetts Lane in Melbourne, a gig and a workshop in Perth, the Finnish Embassy in Canberra, the 505 Club in Sydney and the Taranaki Arts Festival in New Zealand. He remembers being impressed by the atmosphere at the 505, a gig I happened to be at, but most of it is now a blur. The quartet is completed by Tuomo Prättälä on piano and Olavi Louhivuori on drums, who also leads his own group Oddarrang, as well as playing in the great Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’ European quintet, who also toured Australia in 2011. Louhivuori is noted for his light touch, although as the Australian reviewer John McBeath noted in 2008, he is also “discreetly impassioned’, while Pohjola’ trumpet “often used a breathy quality to counterbalance the more familiar brass sound and explored unusual tonal possibilities in original interpretations’. In his version of the Tom Waits’ song “Take it With Me‘, the title track of the quartet’s second album, the trumpet assumes “a Waits-like throat growl’.
Pohjola has said he likes to play popular songs which the audience may know and take them in a new direction. As he said in 2006: “A singer has the possibility of utilizing words that turn a composition into a song and the singer into a storyteller. To the best of our ability, we too try to draw inspiration and guidance from this approach and tell stories through our music even if we do not have any words at our disposal’. The Quartet has also covered songs by Suzane Vega and a “mirror image‘ of “Porcelain‘ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The Ilmiliekki quartet has released just two albums to date, on the extensively documented and strikingly designed TUM label, although a third is in preparation, as Pohjola likes to take things at a steady pace, with one album every three years an optimum, although he has just signed a contract for an album every 18 months with the German label ACT in Berlin. Also planned is a second album by the Ilmielkki Quartet of Finnish songs by Emma Salokoski, who is married to Olavi Louhivuori. Pohjola has also performed with Salokoski in the neo-soul, jazz and funk group Quintessence, along with pianist and vocalist Tuomo Prättälä and others, releasing five albums on the Texicalli label. He has also played drums in a rock band, Silvio, and started off as a classical musician, spending time at the Sibelius Academy, a rite of passage for many Finnish jazz musicians.
Emma Salokoski
He recently completed a duo album for ACT with rising Polish violinist Adam Baldych, with whose Baltic Gang he played on the 2012 ACT album Imaginary Room, and has released an album for the label with one of his other groups, where he is joined by his younger brother, trombonist Ilmari, and some of the big names in Finnish jazz, such as Juhani Aaltonen on flute, Pepa Päivinen on flute and bass clarinet, Pekka Pohjola on bass, Louhivuori on drums, and a string quartet, Aurora (2011), which includes a cover of Miles Davis’ “Concierto de Aranjuez Amour‘ along with 7 originals. The 2012 ACT album Ancient History, which includes a cover of Björk’ “Hyperballad‘, is by yet another quartet, with pianist Aki Rissanen, Lötjönen, and drummer Joonas Riippa, with whom he made another duo album with electronics, the highly experimental Michelin Star (2008) which he considers to be one of his favourite releases; although it very much divided the critics, he “likes to stir the pot’. The album is a mix of electronic glitches, middle eastern samples, starting with the pots and pans rattles and brass band blasts of “Hell’ Kitchen‘, and ending with Stockhausen-like electronic chaos of “When Death Comes‘. Another album which Pohjola released with Riippa and the pianist Aki Rissanen was of incidental music to an extraordinary stage production, in which the audience sat on benches on a revolving stage, by acclaimed director Kristian Smeds, based on Paul Auster’ 1994 novel Mr Vertigo, which was released in 2011, after the trio played in almost 80 performances of the play over a two-year period on the main stage of the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki (http://vimeo.com/23449933). The music is wide-ranging, mostly experimental and free-form, and concludes with “Vertigo Stomp’, a fast and wild Dixieland-type piece. As Soila Lehtonen wrote in Books from Finland: “The venerable 111-year old venue becomes a weird universe of illusions, the deserted auditorium filling occasionally with surreal visions and lights. It is as if the theatre itself were one of the characters of this journey into the story, peopled with a range of quite un-Austerian characters – dead Finnish actresses, for example’.
Master Yehudi (Jukka-Pekka Palo, left) training Walt the Wonder Boy (Tero Jartti): Paul Auster’s novel Mr. Vertigo adapted and directed by Kristian Smeds at the Finnish National Theatre. Photo: Antti Ahonen
Pohjola has also made another duo album on ACT, Speed of Grace (2012) with German jazz pianist and vocalist Jens Thomas, subtitled -wait for it – A Tribute to AC/DC, which turns some of the Australian metal mongers’ classics like “Highway to Hell‘, “Live Wire‘, “Hell’ Bells‘ and “Long Way to the Top‘, into slow ballads of “late night chamber jazz’, and is surprisingly successful and highly recommended.
By now a picture must be emerging of Pohjola of one of the busiest people in showbiz over the past 10 years. He is fortunate enough to be able to make a living from his music, but this is by no means all. Black Motor, a three piece free jazz group from Tampere, north of Helsinki, who are also into AC/DC, and have also been around for 10 years, recently joined forces with Pohjola on Rubidium (2013), also on TUM Records. They will be the subject of a separate interview, but they have run their jazz club nights at a student bar in Tampere called Telakka, where they have invited prominent guests such as saxophonist Juhani Altonen, guitarist Raoul Björkenheim, bassist Teppo Hauta-aho, pianist Iro Haarla and bassist Ulf Krokfors and also played with rapper Hannibal. They also played with renowned German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, at Häiriöjatsit, a mini-festival organized in Tampere. Black Motor sax player Sami Sippola looks as if he would be more at home in a metal band, as their name suggests, with his long hair, beard, tattoos and assortment of floppy hats, but is actually a very polite, gentle and kind man. Mostly consisting of compositions by Pohjola or prolific Black Motor bassist Ville Rauhala, Rubidium also includes one of the late great Finnish drummer Edward Vesala´s most beautiful compositions, “Kynnyspuulla‘ (On the Threshold), as well as “Song of India‘ by Rimsky-Korsakov. There is another Australian connection here – the track “Sax-o-Phun‘ was played by a Finnish saxophonist, Josef Kaartinen, when he won a world saxophone competition in Australia in the 1920s, and later had a Finnish jazz prize named after him. Pohjola and Black Motor are planning a new album together entirely of Edward Vesala compositions. Their gig together at the Helsinki Flow Festival in August was described by Anthony Shaw in All About Jazz in terms of a duel between two very different horn players:
“the two solo instrumentalists faced each other at the front of the stage. Sami Sippola’s saxophone style reflected his own appearance: long straggly hair and beard, beaded cowboy hat and boots, and an instrument that hasn’t seen any polish since it left the factory. He blew long solos, often extricating choruses of overblown notes that bounced from the lower registers, up and back, straining to keep within the bounds of musical sound. By contrast, Pohjola, in dark jacket and tightened tie, parried and interjected or alternatively accompanied the sax’s rasping runs with his own crisper trumpet lines. In contrast with his other, more melodic partnerships, Pohjola seemed to relish the chance to cut and oppose Sippola’s own angular style’.
Edward Vesala, who died in 1999, is considered to be the father of Finnish jazz, as he was the first local player to forge international connections, playing on a number albums on the Munich-based ECM label with Jan Garbarek, Tomasz Stanko and Kenny Wheeler, as well as with his own ensemble Sound and Fury. Pohjola is involved in a new release Kolibri (Hummingbird) on TUM by Vesala’ widow, Iro Haarla, a pianist and harpist slightly reminiscent of Alice Coltrane, who is now partnered with veteran bass player and Vesala alumnus Ulf Krokfors. Following on from two albums on ECM with her Finnish-Norwegian quintet, which Pohjola subbed in as the Norwegian players were “too expensive’ to tour with Haarla, Pojola is described in the album’ liner notes as the “youngster’ of the group (he is 36), and “perhaps the brightest star on today´s creative improvised music scene in Finland’. He has built up a close association with Haarla’ Finnish quintet and sextet, was a soloist when the UMO Jazz Orchestra performed her compositions, and has participated in other Haarla-related projects. Nonetheless he finds it difficult to play her music, and is not always sure he’ getting it right.
In the gig I saw him play at with his quartet at the Porvoo jazz festival just north of Helsinki, he included a version of Ornette Coleman’ “What Reason Could I Give‘ (1971) from the Ilmiliekki Quartet album March of the Alpha Males. On Coleman’ original there are vocals by Asha Puthli, but instead Pohjola played into the grand piano, which produced an eerie echo. He uses space in his playing a great deal, together with the idea of flow, and considers his playing as “music to think to’. He regards the idea of the “Nordic tone” as outlined by British jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, as having some validity as so many people refer to it, and sees it as often involving the influence of folk music, but feels that some Nordic jazz is played just for the sake of atmospherics, especially some associated with the ECM label. He emphasises the importance of melody in jazz, and says that he tends to play tunes rather than harmonies. Surprisingly, one of his big influences is Brian May of Queen, especially in his use of triplets, and he would like to play with him someday. One of his enduring influences is Don Cherry, who of course spent some time in Scandinavia, and influenced jazz musicians there, and Pohjola has a pocket trumpet like Cherry had in Ornette Coleman’ lineup. He also likes to play “free’, and had early improvising experience with a group of reed players, and would like to be able to do more of this. The idea of “play’, like children playing, is also important to him. He has clearly got a long and brilliant career ahead of him.
Tony Mitchell
