Jarmo Savolainen from 1985

Two mini masterpieces of Finnish fusion in the ECM style are coming up on deck early this first week of spring for our equinoctial days, like the first sunlight's warmth coming through after a half-year's night over frozen tundra plains.  The little ballad called Lopuksi is, notwithstanding the slight background scratchy noises distracting, just a brilliant little poem of tenderness and emotion like something clearly out of Finnforest in its masterful heyday:





Or perhaps it's Jasper Van't Hof in style who is being channelled here?  Listen to that musical Aurora Borealis!

At the very start of the record you'll instead remark on the similarity to Joachim Kühn with the held-back tempo of cascading, waterfall piano improvisations.  However, the arrangements, with soprano sax and muted trumpets complemented by synthesizer, will get those chills running up and down your back like mice up and down the grandfather clock once they get started, pummelling the gorgeously-wrought chords written out by this masterful arranger, shifting and sparkling like that aurora in the green night sky.  This is absolute coolness with that pure 60s Hancock even-handed intellectual crispness (cf. Speak Like a Child)...  Even the track called Blues at A2 is not that at all, instead, it's a postmodern rendition of a self-referencing encyclopediac fact-finding postgraduate thesis in composition brought to bear on that simplistic & tedious flat style of flat notes and southern drawling.  You won't believe your ears.  That something so unknown could be so good.  More information can be found here.  In fact, how about a quick bio from discogs:

Jarmo Savolainen (born May 24, 1961 in Iisalmi, Finland) was a Finnish jazz pianist, keyboardist and composer. He studied classical piano in Finland and played in local bands, but then continued his studies at the Berkeley College of Music in Boston. 

Of course he studied classical music, you can hear the depth in education throughout this work.  As well you'll note this is the first of four releases in the eighties documented here.  Could the later ones be as good as this one?  I don't know, once we pass that huge fault line of 1985 it seems the progressiveness of the music falls off a cliff into the depths of the earth, doesn't it?  Let's hope that prog crustal rock gets recycled in the mantle to rise up and get built into continental plates in the future again...

Thanks to the Finnish Connection for these shares!  I love you for bringing this sort of sheer beauty into my life-- and I love this composer for having created it....

Enjoy it...