Matti P
Having originally reviewed this album on a Finnish website in 2020, it was for me among the finest recent jazz albums to come out of Finland, or from any country actually. Featuring -- both as performers and as arrangers -- top musicians such as trumpetist Verneri Pohjola, saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen and pianist Aki Rissanen, the album is easy to enjoy as pure music too, but there's a special story linked to the album's birth.
When guitarist and composer Tapio Ylinen lost his wife to lethal disease in 2015, he picked up the guitar and channeled his grief in the means of improvisational recordings. Over two years later he started to shape a concept album about the loss-centred mental landscape and the thoughts on mortality. He also pondered lyrics, but it soon became clear that some things find their truest expression in music only, and that the genre would be jazz. Ylinen chose six sketches and asked his colleagues to work on them. All the invited musicians took part in the project wholeheartedly, to give their best.
Ylinen himself plays only the brief intro's sad solitary guitar melody, which, without knowing, had started the whole project around the time of the funeral. Lyytinen's arrangement on the 2nd part is already full-blooded jazz. The 3rd part's Pekka Pohjola -reminding fascination is excellently arranged by Verneri Pohjola. Also the pieces arranged by double bassist Jori Huhtala and guitarist Teemu Viinikainen witness the emotional substance meet fluent and rich ensemble playing in a perfect harmony.
Despite the mourning behind the compositions, the album does not dwell in misery but sounds exactly as sophisticated, fresh and timeless as the contemporary jazz can sound at its best. By the time of the final three-part piece 'Towards Dawn' the tone has clearly evolved from sorrow into light. The listener gets a hold of the album's cathartic conceptuality without a slightest sacrifice of pure musical values. Therefore Mortality is a gorgeous evidence of the power of music.
