Esa Pethman's The Modern Sound, from 1965 and RIP Chick Corea: June 12, 1941 to Feb. 9, 2021

Just a beautiful album with one foot in the big, still huge jazz world of the early part of the sixties but another considerable step in the soon to come fusionary vision of truly and seamlessly combining the three worlds of European classical and rock with the former element. You can still see the seams, but the compositions are just magnificent, in my opinion.  The artist was featured before, here, in a much later work coming almost two decades later, that had more easy smooth listening influences but was nonetheless well written.

I guess you could say this is very similar to the famed Modern Jazz Quartet (who I hated, even when I was a jazz fan in college), but far far better.

Shepherd Song:

There are so many great ideas in here, full of creative energy and that thirst to break boundaries that seems like the personality of a young man (I see he was 27 at the time).  It's a bit shocking that at least under his own name, there is so little documented in the database.

Esa Pethman's Esa and Flutes from 1984

From discogs:

Esa Pethman was a Finnish jazz musician (saxophone, flute), born on May 17th, 1938 in Kuusankoski, Finland. 

Note he was a member of Heikki Sarmanto's Big Band and sextet.  I presented quite a bit of Sarmanto's music in the past and indeed I am happy to see quite a few of his records are easily available for public consumption.  Esa on the other hand is not as well known.  His first album from 1965 (way back in those glory days of Beatlemania), The Modern Sound of Finland, is a masterpiece of modern classical composition played in the jazz idiom, full of researched and creative, one-off ideas, and is highly recommended.  Alas, some two decades later, the intensely adventurous spirit has, inevitably, burned itself out but we still have some really gorgeous and beautifully played chamber jazz-fusion in almost a library mode (great new genre there!) as you can tell from a sample track called Cerulean Blue:

Notice how the trite descending minor bass pattern and melody played on the crystalline electric guitar (the Stairway to Heaven pattern as I've called it before) is made interesting by modulating the whole thing up a whole tone each phrase-- whereupon, after some three steps up suddenly like a flock of birds taking flight the flute sings an altogether different song this time anchored in a major chord with added major seventh, evoking the beauty of a beautiful bright spring sky, perhaps with the minor stanzas representing the fluffy cumulus being herding past.  Really quite brilliant composition and arrangement.

But there are many more such simple delights to find in here.  Altogether, another winning find from my magnificent record-hunter friend...