Concert Review | The best moments of the Lonna Island festival were unexpected when the musicians played together for the first time

Jazz musician Makaya McCraven met her Finnish colleagues for the first time. “Let’s just call”, was their agreement.

25.7. 15:49

Music

Odysseus Festival on the island of Lonna 23.7. and 24.7.: Hailu Mergia, Etran de L’Aïr, Greetings from Chicago, Alabaster DePlume, Makaya McCraven Quartet.

Drummer, producer and band leader by Makaya McCraven the international breakthrough was a widely praised record In The Moment (2015), which, despite its name, was not exactly instantaneous.

Rather the opposite. McCraven, who was born in Paris and grew up in the United States, worked on it from just under fifty hours of recordings that had been made at the gigs of his jazz band over the course of twelve months.

Since then, this method of combining rhythmic musical styles – prune, layer and recycle, cut and paste – has become a trademark of Chicago-based McCraven, but there was no trace of it at London Island’s second Odysseus festival on Saturday night.

We made it almost a peek into the starting point of his preferred organic process, as both the concert and the American-Finnish band of seven musicians were unique on the open and sunny Terassilava.

Tenor saxophonist Jussi Kannaste (right) and flugelhorn player Jukka Eskola were overshadowed by the other musicians of the random American-Finnish septet as soloists.

That meant McCraven’s quartet plus a tenor saxophonist Jussi Kannasteflugelhorn Jukka Eskola and the drummer Jaska Lukkarinen met in London for the first time before the concert and performed without planning. “Let’s just call”, was the agreement.

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In inexperienced hands, this could have led to aimlessness, but Seitsikko, who performed under the name Greetings from Chicago, caught mostly repeated and grooving songs on the fly, which sounded “right” both alone and together, as part of a larger whole. So the concert had a well-thought-out beginning and end, even though it seemed to come too early, at fifty minutes, from the enthusiastic audience.

The most important ones the roles of soloists fell handsomely to Eskola and Kannastee in the front row, although McCraven’s regular trumpeter also Marquis Hill and a guitarist Matt Gold appeared a couple of times. Still, the essence was in the ensemble playing, where, despite the special situation, there was no feeling of excessive groping.

Repetition, layering and recycling were trumps at Terassilava on Saturday as well earlier. Although with slightly varying penalties, first with a trio and then with a quartet.

Born and raised in Ethiopia, Hailu Mergia’s international career only started ten years ago. He visited Helsinki for the third time this weekend.

The Odysseus Festival the star and the sold-out audience on Saturday was the keyboard player called the pioneer of “Ethiojazz”. Hailu Mergia, whose international career only started ten years ago – with reissues of records made in Ethiopia in the 1970s. That’s when he also returned to performing as a musician, after supporting himself for twenty years as a taxi driver in the United States.

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But the seventy-year-old Mergia, who performed for the third time in Finland, was no longer able to surprise, neither with his extraordinary life story, nor even with his instrumental music.

Vice versa. His favored reduced touring line-up – bass and drums – can’t compete with his new and especially his old, weather-beaten recordings in the long run. It’s going so badly that Mergia’s Ethiopian groove becomes one-manifested and congeals – and as a musician he remains partly in a supporting role. If only he had played more accordion and melodica in his old and new songs, which he chose to add to the concert.

“Are you ready”, asked the second guitarist of the Nigerian band Etran de L’Aïr right after the first song on Saturday on Lonna’s Terrace Stage and got the audience up to dance. There was no need to repeat the prompt.

After Mergia in the music of the Nigerian Etran de L’Aïr, who performed, there were even fewer variations, but mostly with a successful real purpose. The tour line-up, which has been shortened from records to a quartet, is based on the repetition of small musical motifs, which are more or less the same from one song to another.

Admittedly, the hypnotization was now halfway through in the evening sun, as the band left Terassilava after less than half an hour, albeit to return for another ten minutes.

Sunday’s headliner, McCraven’s own quartet, did not need to be coaxed to perform. It played an hour and a quarter of a strong basic set filled with long solos, mainly from its two latest albums, of which the long-prepared In These Times will be published in September. It still didn’t reach the momentary uniqueness of Saturday.

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But probably no other English songwriter-musician who performed before would have reached it Alabaster DePlume after. He got up on the terrace without practicing as a cellist The only Jew and the drummer Joonas Leppänen with, because his own band had stayed in England due to flight difficulties.

Englishman Alabaster DePlume, who played the saxophone with a trembling voice, praised both life and the audience equally on London’s Terrace Stage – and in a way that exceeded all limits of moderation.

But it didn’t matter. On the contrary, the uniqueness of the situation really delighted DePlume, who played electric guitar and saxophone, and whose narrative songs were some kind of avant-folk.

Most of all, however, I was impressed by DePlume’s ability to take his audience, wrap us with his rambling and humorous speeches into a community that loves the uniqueness of life and smiles together. You can’t get much bigger than that.

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