Culture|Concert review
Two-bass Linda May Han Oh shone above all as a composer.
Jazz. Umo Helsinki Jazz Orchestra at the Workshop 15.10. Conductor Rasmus Soini, guest bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh.
Bassist and composer Linda May Han Ohin was supposed to perform in Helsinki for the first time a year and a half ago, in April 2020. However, the club concert of his own standard quartet was canceled at the last minute due to a corona pandemic.
Now the visit took place on another, much larger scale.
Linda May Han Oh (b. 1984), who taught and performed as a resident guest in Finland for two weeks, played her compositions as a visiting soloist for fifteen musicians on Friday night. In the sold-out Wagon Hall of the workshop.
And oh! Yes, he was worth the wait!
Linda May Han Oh played both of her instruments at the concert.
Except perhaps for those who imagined Oh, at the heart of the concert, a double and bassist and bass guitarist who was soloing a lot and for a long time, showcasing his unparalleled talents in the forefront of the jazz orchestra. Or the one who grew up in Australia, whose world fame has been enhanced especially by the recordings of the trumpet player Dave Douglas, saxophonist Joe Lovanon, guitarists Pat Methenyn and pianist Vijay Iyerin with.
No, now starring composer Linda May Han Oh, whose own and new orchestral arrangements made in Finland to three old songs added an even more compositional stamp to the works.
Composer the emphasis on the role was still not a big surprise to those who have heard his two latest albums, Walk Against Windin (2017) and Aventurine (2019). They are all his best: more multi-level and more purposeful than previous records.
Of them, four of Ohi’s six songs had been selected for Korjaamo’s concert, and their original arrangements are already quite “orchestral”. However, three of them are played by a combination of a jazz quartet and a string quartet, and exceptionally intertwined.
In this respect, the greatest transformation in the concert was experienced Oskari Siirtolan adapted to attract Speech Impediment, whose record also recognizes the small and different bass guitar pattern explained by the imaginative starting point of the composition. In it, a stuttering man tries to tell a woman about his love.
The soloist of the song, which has almost doubled in size, was a tenor saxophonist Jonathan Rautio, which solo also culminated in the concert’s “more jazzy” song, a visual artist Mark Rothkon the painting refers to Blue Over Goldin. That, too, was the premiere in this form, mediated for the first time by Umo as its mediator Rasmus Soini.
But in the brightest colors glowed Oh’s spouse, the pianist Fabian Almazanin composed by Flamboyan, in Finnish flame wood.
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