Edward Vesala, Satu (ECM, 1977)
After ten years as a mainstay of Finland’s necessarily small music scene, playing in everything from dance bands to classical ensembles, by the autumn of 1976 drummer Martti “Edward” Vesala was ready to make his second album as band leader for Germany jazz label ECM. Satu (Finnish for ‘fairy tale’) was recorded in Oslo by a pan-Scandinavian group with a couple of Poles thrown in, almost an all-star line-up for the label at that point, trumpeters Palle Mikkelborg and Tomasz Stańko and guitarist Terje Rypdal among them.
Vesala’s style behind the kit is best described as illustrative: I counted just over a minute of Satu’s 40-minute running time in which he performs the standard role of timekeeper. This non-metrical approach influences the sound of the whole record, which teeters on the edge of free jazz, but is held in place by Vesala’s ghostly, modal unison themes. This is jazz divorced from its African-American roots. Miles Davis’s influence was pervasive in European jazz in the 1970s, but Satu has little in common with, say, Miles’s Pangaea, recorded the previous year.
Plenty of midnight sun mood music, then, but thankfully Satu never descends into the New Agey blandness that afflicted much of ECM’s subsequent output. The lounge jazz detour of ‘Ballade Pour San’ turns out to be a feint, and the band soon knock it off beam. Rypdal in particular turns in some of his best work, with guitar parts that owe more to Hendrix than any conventional jazz players.
As a child ‘big band’ to me meant my dad’s James Last cassettes or whatever was clogging up Radio 2’s schedules. If nothing else, Satu’s Arctic Zappa is a pretty good corrective to that.
Andrew Petrie
