Summer is coming to an end in Helsinki, although there’ plenty of sunshine around still, as one festival has merged into the next, and numerous performances in every musical genre, many of them outdoors and free, have taken place since I have been here since late July. Apart from the Flow Festival and the Soliti Fest, which I have already reviewed, there have been the Jazz-Espa from 28 July to 3 August and the Etno-Espa Festival, mainly folk music, both on an outdoor stage in the Esplanade from 11 to 21 August, culminating in the Night of the Arts on 21 August on which concerts took place all over the city in numerous indoor and outdoor venues. Art goes kapakka (barhopping) took place at numerous restaurants in the city from 14 to 28 August, and the Niubi Festival, in which Finnish musicians perform with Asian musicians, was held at the Korjaamo, which holds a couple of venues in west Helsinki. Then there are numerous jazz clubs and bars which hold regular live music events, some of them outdoors, not to mention a couple of film festivals and a design festival, so there is something happening most nights of the week. Helsinki is saturated with a great deal of excellent, distinctive music of all genres, which never ceases to surprise and impress, although you’ll probably not hear much of it outside these borders.
Then of course there’ the annual Helsinki Festival held from 15 to 28 August, for those who don’ mind paying top prices, while the other festivals are mostly free. The Helsinki Festival featured the Kronos Quartet with Laurie Anderson, who last appeared in Finland five years ago with Lou Reed. This time she brought her work Landfall, already seen at the Adelaide festival in March, and partly based on Hurricane Sandy, which occurred while she was coming to the end of writing the work, and as a result of which she lost a lot of older work and technology. In retrospect she finds that a relief: “I’m a pack rat. I save a lot of stuff. And I realised that many of the things I lost were very unimportant to me. I gradually realised that I was quite grateful for this automatic clean-out. So that became part of the work’. I saw her in a live interview in the Huvila Tent, the festival headquarters, in which among other things she revealed she is part of a group formed by Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) called Future Feminists, who perform works partly related to the Occupy Movement, and pursue a political agenda despite her suspicion of political art. Looking resplendent in her 60s in a Japanese-styled floral outfit with trousers, she charmed the audience, one of which had a vinyl copy of USA Live which she signed for him. The Kronos Quartet were also performing with wild, feral Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen, who turned fifty in August, ten years after he first performed with Kronos in Uniko, and was later released as a DVD. Pohjonen came to the Sydney Festival in 2008, where he astounded audiences with one virtual electronic performance, performed without his accordion, and crossed genres between jazz, folk, electronic, dance, rock and classical. He was described in the Herald at the time as a “pulverising avalanche of dark, primeval, sonic theatre’. He is a regular at Finnish festivals, and also in London.
Another Festival guest was former Cream drummer Ginger Baker’ Jazz Confusion, playing fusion jazz with African influences, and supported by Tampere’ hottest free jazz trio Black Motor, who also performed a gig at the Koko Jazz Loft in Kallio, where a regular jazz gig takes place every Monday. Another treat was Black Motor’ rhythm section performing with legendary and prolific Finnish improvising guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim, who alternates between Finland, Norway and the USA, and plays a Hendrix-influenced electric jazz guitar which is a real blast, but maintains a highly pleasant, genial and easy going persona. Spanning blues, rock, jazz and even orchestral music, he was formerly a composer-performer with the group Krakatau, who made four albums in the early 1990s, two with ECM, and he has also headed Oslo-based Scorch and the US power metal Blixt Trio and performed with Finland’ UMO Jazz Orchestra – the first record Bjorkenheim played on was Finnish legendary dummer Edward Vesala’ Bad Luck, Good Luck with UMO. His Finnish band Ecstasy is an ongoing project, and he has also recorded on Helsinki-based TUM Records with Lukas Ligeti, the son of late Hungarian avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, on an album on which both the guitarist and the percussionist play with bows. As he said in a recent interview in the Finnish Music Quarterly: “I think that improvisation is really a matter of life philosophy, like how do you make a great dinner with a can of peas and a package of spaghetti? To me improvisation implies an attitude of making creative use of the materials at hand, and by doing so occasionally coming up with something brilliant, something that couldn’ have been preconceived, and surpasses what one could have even imagined.’ He and the Black Motor guys really kick up a storm, culminating in “Homage to John Coltrane’, where he transposes the master’ sheets of sound into guitar stylings. “John Coltrane would be my main influence, even generally speaking. While there are many other great players, his passion and emotion just overwhelm me’. Like Hendrix, he finds strong affinities between guitar and saxophone.
Another veteran Finnish jazz musician is the sax player Eero Koivistoinen, who has been around since the mid-1960s, and played a gig in Jazz Espa with young pianist Alexi Tuomarila, who is recently among a number of Finnish jazz musicians who have released albums on Dave Stapleton’ excellent UK label Edition. Surprisingly they played a jazz version of Dylan’ “Blowing in the Wind’, and seemed to be concentrating on crowd pleasers, although Koivistoinen’ cv includes playing with Edward Vesala and 60s Finnish rock band Blues Section, his quartet winning the band competition at Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969, as well as a stint with UMO and time in Senegal in the late 1990s with a group of drummers with whom he also toured Finland. A much younger band who appeared at both Jazz Espa and Art Goes Kapakka was Equally Stupid, who consist of a tenor sax player from Finland, a baritone guitarist from Iceland and a drummer from Switzerland. A trio of intense improvisers, they get their name from their addition to George Orwell’ statement “All are equal. Some are more equal than others. But only few are equally stupid’. They have a debut album, Exploding Head, the title of which gives an indication of where they are headed, especially since they also sport highly eccentric headwear which includes a top hat and a pilot’s headgear. Innovative trio Mopo (Moped) also played at AGK, after wowing audiences at the Flow Festival with sax player Linda Fredrickson playing baritone and soprano saxes at the same time, a series of vocalizations, and a number of odd percussion instruments. They’re another Finnish jazz group who are really going places and doing highly unconventional things. The only other woman I know of who plays baritone sax is the excellent French player Celine Bonacina, who has recorded two albums on the German label ACT, but Fredrickson seems more versatile.
The night of the arts on the 21st August featured a free afternoon performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra in a central shopping centre, moving around in circular formations under a series of circular platforms, dressed in shiny African robes and led by the 90 year old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen. They play a mixture of percussion and brass instruments and vocalize to a highly appreciative audience who had been informed of the impromptu event by social media (the Arkestra were also part of the Helsinki Festival at the ritzy Savoy Theatre on the Esplanade). I was fortunate enough (or not) to see Sun Ra perform with the Arkestra shortly before his death at 79 in 1993, when he shared the bill with Sonic Youth, long time fans, in Central Park in New York. On that occasion, there were plenty of white trash Sonic Youth fans expressing their disapproval, shouting out that the Arkestra “sucked’, so it was great to see young Finns really getting into the act on this occasion. In the evening jazz singer Emma Salokoski joined forces with young virtuoso accordionist Johanna Juhola, who specialises in Argentinian tango, in the Kuja Bar and Bistro as part of AGK. I saw Juhola last year in York, England, and she is really something to behold, a real prodigy who plays in a more conventional tango style than Pohjonen, but is incorporating electronics and video into her act, and is also going places.
Salokoski has played with ace trumpeter Verneri Pohjola’ Ilmiliekki Quartet, who have toured Australia twice, and sings in both Finnish and English. Then it was back to the 10th Etno-Espa festival, where extraordinary jouhikko (an ancient Finnish-Karelian bowed lyre made from horse hair) player Pekko Käppi was performing with his trio, featuring a guitarist and bass player, both on seemingly homemade Bo Diddley-styled box guitars. With his instrument adorned with a white skull, Kappi specialises in traditional murder ballads and the like, and is a passionate singer whose style is close to the rawest and dirtiest blues. I’ve seen him several times now, and he just seems to get better.
The trio was followed by leading Finnish rapper Paleface, who for this occasion has reconstituted himself as a folk singer with acoustic guitar, singing workers’ songs, and part of a burgeoning Finnish folk rap scene which has also been featured in the Finnish Music Quarterly. Amanda Kauranne writes: “Paleface, aka Karri Miettinen, is already a grand old man of Finnish rap, even though he is barely middleaged … (his 2010 album) Helsinki – Shangri-La went gold in less than a month and nabbed a string of awards ranging from an Emma award for the best male soloist to a nomination as the most notable cultural deed of the year by the left-wing cultural organisation VATAK. The album’ title song, originally named Perussuomalainen jenkka (True Finns’ jenkka, [a folk dance]), described in some 30 verses the landslide victory of the True Finns party at the Finnish parliamentary election. “The melody comes straight from the old rekilaulu [“sleigh song’, a type of rhymed stanzaic folksong] tradition. The track was initially designed as a clever opener for the album – you buy rap, you hear folk music – but it ended up growing into something bigger‒. (http://musicfinland.fi/en/in-the-spotlight/2013/5/folk-rap-is-here-to-stay).
Paleface, who got his name when he was living in the USA and performing with mostly black rappers, released a brilliant English language album in 2001, The Pale Ontologist, before he decided to switch to Finnish and comment about the local political situation, although his 2012 album Food for the Gods was again in English, as well as Arabic and French, and one of Tanzania’ 120 dialects. In 2013 folk fiddler Pitkäsen Matti, who also performed at Etno-Espan, released his debut album Nojatuoliblues, also folk rap. A former jazz drummer, peacekeeping worker and policeman, he started rapping when studying folk music at the Sibelius Academy. He has stated: “In their basic forms, traditional music and rap may not be very similar, but it is easy to combine the two. I see rap as modern-day runo singing’. Runo singing, or runolaulu, is an earlier form of rekilaulu, rhyming songs from the 17th century, which were later often based on the Finnish Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology. (http://www.worldmusic.net/guide/finland-new-runes/). Other exponents of Finnish folk rap include Asa, a politically conscious punk poet, who has released several albums collaborating with folk singers, and says: “It works like a mental springboard to be able to work on any issue whatsoever inside my own head – whether it is an injustice or a positive piece of news – and turn it into a rhyme bicycle’.
Paleface also performed on a specially constructed outdoor stage close to the Mbar Terrace with his rock band Räjähtävä nyrkki (Exploding Fist), who include a DJ, and Egyptian rock singer Ramy Essam, one of the leading exponents of the Arab Spring in Tahir Square in Cairo in 2011. Essam has been called “the creative voice of the revolution’ and was beaten up by thugs from Mabarek’ regime, and also imprisoned and tortured, but continued performing in bandages. Paleface rapped over some of Essam’ songs, mostly in English, and kept exhorting the crowd rather lamely to “make some noise’ while constantly declaring “Helsinki worldwide’. It was a short concert, culminating in a collaboration on Paleface’ track “Africa Corruption’, a result of his two month visit to West Africa. This was part of an event called To the Square, which celebrated movements “from Tunis to Cairo, from Occupy to Wikileaks and Blockupy Frankfurt, from Tianamen Square to Bolotnaya Square, Moscow’. The audience included a large number of very vocal Egyptians, as well as a number of Paleface fans.
The Niubi Festival (“Niubi’ is Chinese for “fucking awesome’, literally “cow pussy’), featured an opening set at mbar by a duo called AM444, formed in Shanghai by ChaCha, a singer, songwriter, MC and apparently a well-known figure of the Chinese underground, along with Jay.Soul, a Dutch producer & DJ who has lived in Shanghai for a few years. ChaCha kept apologising for singing in Chinese, and came across as a very poppy performer, while Jay.Soul twiddled knobs and made crackling electronic noises. They were joined by Finnish luminary Jimi Tenor and his mate Desto, Tenor on flute and knobs, Desto on knobs, and the highlight of their collaboration was a totally improvised number after they were called back for an encore by the audience. The following night events moved to Korjammo, and were opened by Siinai, a Finnish prog metal group, two of whose members were wearing black Ku Klux Klan-styled hoods, while the lead guitarist wore a fringed suede jacket over a bare chest with a medallion. Their music didn’ redeem their ghastly fashion sense, and they were far too loud, with a cooing female vocalist who struggled to be heard. Filastine and Nova are a US DJ and an Indonesian singer/instrumentalist who also resorted to a loudhailer, while both played percussion, the DJ doing an extensive bout on a wired-up supermarket trolley. The visuals were spectacular, with political events from Indonesia and around the world, and the crowd was very impressed, especially a handful of Indonesians who were present.
Chiu Wan are a Chinese psychedelic rock quartet hailing from Beijing, with a female singer-bass player, a guitarist who also plays keyboards and electric viola, and they played a pleasantly subtle set which was very engaging. Their second time in Finland, their name means “ball hitting’, and is the name of a Chinese game very similar to golf which was invented in the Song Dynasty, but they claim their name comes from Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi’ “Qi Wu Lun’, a mystical work on the relationship between nature and human life. They have a very spacey, drone-line sound, and must be quite unique in China. They are a highlight of the festival, which also features Pekko Käppi and his band, and an intriguing Finnish synth trio called Aavikko, who combine droll comedy with synthesizers and drums, and sound something like of combination of Laibach and the all-analogue Icelandic Apparat Organ Quartet. Dressed in military uniforms, with drums dominating, they perform a song by and about a Finnish friend who is detained by the US authorities and sent to Guantanamo Bay, which gives their set a political slant. As I have a plane to catch the next morning, I miss the headliners – London-based Japanese band Bo Ningen, who combine Krautrock and Japanese hardcore, and Indonesian outfit the Trees and the Wild, who play “hazy ambient folk’.
There are lots of other musicians and bands I have seen over the past six weeks or so, but they’ve either slipped my mind or I’ve run out of energy, but it is clear that Helsinki has a lot to offer on the musical front both locally and internationally, of a quality not easy to find anywhere else. I also witnessed a “metal mass’, which took place in a stone church hewn out from rock and built up on the edges with more stones, which has excellent acoustics and was impressive for the dedication of the mixed-gender musicians, including a female vocalist, if not so much for the religious message. It was the opening event of a conference on music and spirituality called “Holy Crap!’
