Lumi is the 1987 album with which Finnish drummer and composer Edward Vesala brought his large ensemble Sound and Fury to ECM. The music is his, scored for brass, reeds, guitar, accordion, harp and piano, with Iro Haarla as creative co-arranger. Its colours are unusual for a jazz orchestra and its moods change quickly, from impressionist tone poem to Finnish tango.
Vesala had already made Nan Madol and Satu for the label in the 1970s, but this was his first ECM recording with Sound and Fury. Haarla plays piano and harp, Raoul Björkenheim electric guitar and Taito Vainio accordion. A reed section including Jorma Tapio and Tapani Rinne doubles on clarinets, bass clarinet and flutes, and trumpet, trombone, tuba and bass complete the eleven players. Bill Shoemaker has called Tapio the linchpin of the band's saxophones, and dates the strongest edition of Sound and Fury from his and Haarla's arrival. The album was recorded in June 1986 at Finnvox Studios in Helsinki, then mixed digitally at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Jan Erik Kongshaug. Vesala produced it together with Manfred Eicher. All nine pieces are Vesala's, except the closing Together, written with Tomasz Stanko.
The nine-minute opener, The Wind, sets out from Haarla's solo piano arpeggios and grows into a tone poem for the whole band. Frozen Melody goes the other way, a short piece of considerable force for the full ensemble. Fingo is a playful take on the Finnish tango, three minutes long. Elsewhere Björkenheim's guitar takes solos of real power.
The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave the album a rare five-star rating, and The Wire found that "each piece is full of melodic ideas, brilliantly scored". Writing about Haarla in Point of Departure, Shoemaker argued that her arrangements make "the most lasting impressions" across Vesala's ECM albums, and he heard in the ensemble a sighing attack with a long trailing decay. The partnership continued on Ode To The Death Of Jazz, recorded for ECM a few years later.
This CD (ECM 1339) belongs to Touchstones, ECM's series of catalogue albums reissued in cardboard sleeves, begun in 2008. This edition appeared in 2019, the year of the label's 50th anniversary. Lumi was first released in 1987.
