** Limited edition of 150 sealed LP individually numbered with hype sticker. ** Recorded in the charged intimacy of Helsinki’s Kallio district, Live in Kallio captures Markus Holkko Quartet treating the stage less as a platform and more as a pressure chamber. The set unfolds as a continuous negotiation between tight thematic control and volatile improvisation, with the band sculpting a sound that nods to classic electric jazz while speaking in a distinctly contemporary, Finnish accent. What emerges is not a souvenir of a gig but a self-contained world: saturated, restless, and quietly obsessed with detail.
At the core of this world is Markus Holkko on alto and baritone sax, pivoting between serrated, forward-driving lines and slower, grainy lyricism that lets silence do some of the talking. His compositions are built on sturdy, memorable cells, but the live setting encourages them to sprawl, bend and ghost back in altered forms. The duality of alto and baritone becomes a narrative device in itself: sharp, agile figures slicing through the texture one moment, then a darker baritone register dragging the music toward heavier, almost doom-like contours the next.
Surrounding that reed-led center is the molten glow of Samuli Rautiainen on electric piano, whose Fender Rhodes work anchors the album’s harmonic atmosphere. Instead of leaning on retro fetishism, Rautiainen uses the Rhodes as a textural engine, shifting from glassy clusters to dense, overdriven chords that push against the sax lines and thicken the air around them. His voicings often blur the border between rhythm and harmony, generating subtle polyrhythms inside the chordal fabric and nudging the music toward trance-like repetition just as it threatens to fly apart.
The low-end axis of the quartet belongs to Juuso Rinta on double bass and Teemu Mustonen on drums, a partnership that gives Live in Kallio its physical weight. Rinta’s bass playing moves agilely between spring-loaded walking lines, ostinatos that pin down odd-meter patterns, and arco shadings that add an almost chamber-like hue to certain passages. Mustonen responds with drumming that favors broken grooves and off-center accents over straight time-keeping, building structures from cymbal washes, sharp snare detonations and tom figures that seem to comment on, rather than merely support, the front line. Together they create an elastic grid on which the rest of the band can lean, stretch and occasionally abandon without ever losing the underlying sense of motion.
What makes the album feel specifically rooted in Kallio is the way this quartet balances sophistication with grit. The music is detailed, full of harmonic sleights of hand and rhythmic feints, yet there is an unvarnished quality to the performance: no studio gloss, no safety net, just four musicians committing to long-form arcs in front of an audience that can feel ideas being tested in real time. In that sense, Live in Kallio documents a band at a precise point in its evolution, seizing a neighborhood’s nocturnal energy and translating it into a live statement where electric jazz, Nordic melancholy and urban edge intersect.
