The Nordic Jazz Quintet, 1975

The band was mentioned in connection with our Pop Liisa / Jazz Liisa expedition.  This quintet made one legit LP in 1975 with 3 long tracks, and I won't repeat my lack of patience with those.  Note that the band did include the famed guitarist Jukka Tolonen who appeared in a few of the Pop Liisa / Jazz Liisas, and the quintet as well in the same year recorded for that radio series.  He's rounded out here by bassist Kjell Jansson, percussionist Petur Östlund, flute and sax player Knut Riisnæs and pianist Ole Kock Hansen.

In fact, the long track on side a was played at least partly on the jazz liisa a side of things too.  Here on the official 1975 released LP, the "Nordjazz Suite" includes only a few minutes of composed music, three at the beginning and three more at the end, with the remainder a long and boring series of improvisations, so if they are attempting to represent Scandinavia as boring, they've got me convinced.  Specifically, there's a wonderful fusionary flute intro with ascending electric piano chords followed by some quick improvs, then, as if they were too excited to get back to noodling, or too stoned to realize they had to play a song, there are more and more drawn out improvs with bass for 4 minutes, a wailing sax for 4 more, a meanderingly aimless guitar like a drunkard's walk for another 4 and then the absolute abysmal torture of a several minute long percussion-only solo including a bunch of irritating grade-school triangles I wish I could have torn from his hands.  Finally then an acoustic piano returns to save the day to close out the song with a more tender ballad.   And that's the first side.

The other two tracks were written by Tolonen and are altogether not too bad, I'll sample you the track called Hysterical by him: