Edward Vesala

Nordic Gallery is the last ECM album by the Finnish drummer and composer Edward Vesala and his band Sound & Fury. It was recorded in 1993 and 1994 at the Sound and Fury Studio in Korkeakoski, Finland. Twelve Vesala pieces move between Finnish folk melody, chamber writing, rock energy and his very personal kind of jazz, with found sounds and birdsong threaded through the arrangements. It closes a run of four Sound & Fury albums on the label, after Lumi, Ode To The Death Of Jazz and Invisible Storm.

Vesala plays drums, percussion, bass, tamboura and angklung. Iro Haarla, his wife and closest collaborator, plays harp, piano, keyboards, accordion and koto, and she also co-composed and arranged much of his music. She had taken up the harp at twenty, self-taught, because Vesala needed a harpist who could improvise. The reeds and flutes of Jorma Tapio and Pepa Päivinen lead a horn section that is joined by trumpet, guitar, accordion, bass, cello and clarinet. The guitarist Jimi Sumén also recorded the sessions, Jan Erik Kongshaug mixed them at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, and Vesala produced with Manfred Eicher.

The album opens with Bird In The High Room, eleven minutes of cymbals, muted horns, drums and recorded birdsong. Field recordings lead on through the short Fulflandia into The Quay of Meditative Future, where Haarla's harp is a constant, veiled presence. Bluego passes the lead between accordion and gravelly tenor saxophone in a tango taken apart and rebuilt. Between the longer tracks sit miniatures such as Unexpected Guest and A Significant Look Of Birch Grove, which lasts barely a minute.

Writing in Point of Departure, Bill Shoemaker traced a growing severity in Vesala's later records, but heard in the opening track proof that "Vesala's charming whimsy remained intact". BBC Music Magazine praised him as "a highly original composer" whose palette includes harp, woodwinds, accordion and percussion. ECM's own notes recall that the Penguin Guide to Jazz counted Vesala a major musical presence. He died in 1999, and Haarla went on to lead her own groups, recording for ECM from Northbound onwards.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1541, first released in October 1994.