Esa Helasvuo almost compleat, with a rip of his 1985 previously unavailable Huomenna Sinä Tulet

A quick review of this Finnish musician/pianist I was reminded of, obviously, when going through Jazz-Liisa.  From discogs:

Born on March 9, 1945. A Finnish composer, arranger , pianist and lecturer.

Clearly his masterpiece was Think-Tank-Funk, a wonderful and poetic name simultaneously describing the intellectual quality of this music and satirizing those real-world intellectual exercises in futility, who I blame for almost tipping humanity into the hell of nuclear war thanks to their 'logical' appraisals of how a conflict against the USSR could be won by the US at the negligible cost of destroying human civilization (and their appraisals turned out to be mostly wrong, based on a form of game theory that was superseded by more sophisticated versions, a good example of how bad science is worse than no science at all).  Today the think tanks have found a wonderful new raison d'etre: to rationalize the crazed social experiments of politicians all over the world who want to validate their intuition that rich people ought to get richer, to hell with everything else ("burn baby burn").

Anyways I would expect almost anyone reading this to be familiar with the album.  The astonishing vocal track, Song for a Tube, a premonition/prediction of the rise of youtube from those wonderful think-tanks:





Moving through the discography, the next album from 1973 is clearly a children's album, no interest on my part in buying and ripping, while the 1976 ripped some years ago for our benefit by Mr. Morgan is an odd mix of vocal jazz, classical chamber, children's songs and simplistic pieces, the best ex. is this:





The 1974 is a solo piano album which is all over the place, and to me just impossible to like.  I can't for the life of me understand what happened to the brilliance of Think-Tank-Funk.  The best aspect of it is the cover painting, which is really gorgeous and worth looking at up close (you can see a good scan on discogs).  The 1977 Q is well known and deservedly famous, in fact, in its pure expression of the cool style of Finnish contemporary jazz.

Then of course we jump to today's entry, the 1985 vocal jazz album.  We see this repeatedly where a muscular progressive seventies spirit like in the 3 Edition Speciale LPs is neutered once we enter the 80s (Orchestra II).  Susanna was a Finnish actress who also made some vocal albums in the early 80s.
Overall, this sounds very much like the prior Ahlenvahti vocal LP I posted last month, relatively humdrum, no instrumentals, nothing fusiony.  All the compositions are by Esa.  Note that the other brilliant Esa, Kotilainen, appears here too, credited on the accordeon (!).  His Ajatuslapsi is one of my all-time favourite keyboard albums, and note that a CD release appeared recently with bonus tracks.  The last track has lyrics from an Edgar Allen Poe poem and the chords are correspondingly mysterious:





For a more positive experience, the first track has a relatively sweet buoyant sound to it; cowritten by the two principals:





Our wonderful friend also made a new lossless rip off a VG plus vinyl Q which I'll post below.