Jan Granlie, Salt-peanuts.eu (Pan-Scandinavian)
KULLHAMMAR / HEIKINHEIMO / MEAAS SVENDSEN / AALTONEN: The Father, The Sons and The Junnu (Moserobie)
Finnish saxophonist and flute player Juhani Aaltonen turns 85 on December 12 this year. He was born in Kouvola, Finland, but have been living outside Helsinki in recent years. He was educated from both the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and Berklee in Boston, and he started playing jazz professionally in the 50s and has been a prominent figure in the Finnish jazz community ever since. He has done records with, among others, Arild Andersen and Edvard Vesala, Graham Collier, Iro Haarla, Henrik Otto Donner, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, the Umo Jazz Orchestra, his own trio and many, many others. The last time we heard him at a concert was during last year's Tampere Jazz Happening, where he played in a quintet with Joe McPhee, and they gave us the best concert of the festival this cold evening in Telaka. Now he has toured Sweden and Finland with a bunch of young Nordic musicians, which resulted in a recording at the Arabia studio in Helsinki on May 5 last year. And through the 6 compositions we get, all four of them prove their strength in excellent ways, ending up with one of this year's best recordings. And when they round off this fantastic record with Kullhammar's "Suomaleinen Maailmanmestari" (The Finnish World Champion), which is guaranteed to Juhani "Junnu" Aaltonen, who has always been one of Kullhammar's leading stars in the Nordic jazz. This is a slightly heavy ballad, in which Kullhammar exudes the typical in Aaltonen's tenor saxophone, and sets an unusually worthy punctuation for a brilliant record, which is entirely in Aaltonen's spirit, and which should not be placed under K for Kullhammar, or T for The Father, The sons & the Junnu in the record shelves, but under A for Aaltonen. Or not really, the record will not be placed in the shelves at all, at least not the first year. It should be easy to find and be played when I'm in good mood, when I'm having a bad day, or when the day is perfect. Gorgeous!