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Hello to you, and thanks for clicking on our newsletter. We can’t say it enough, how we really appreciate it. The world keeps getting more bonkers by the day. It’s hard watching the news without despairing, but burying your head in the sand and pretending things aren’t going on isn’t the answer either. We all need something to distract us from the grimness, though, and should take it wherever we can get it. Music, film, books, art, sport, food, the list goes on. Celebrate life and the good things. Obviously, for us here at Sorry State it is music, but we all enjoy other aspects of the arts and culture. Even sport with a couple of us. LoL.
This week my record listening has covered a lot of territory. I’ve been diving deeper into a lot of those reissues of music from other parts of the non-Western world that I touched on last week. I’ve been listening to obscure metal albums from bands I hadn’t heard of that we have here at the shop from a collection we recently bought. With John Scott about to jet off to Paris any day now, he’s been playing a lot of Franco playlists here at the store. Plenty of yé-yé, French girl pop goodies, which I love. Any time the song Les filles c’est fait pour faire l’amour by Charlotte Leslie comes on, I am tapping my feet and nodding my head. That one was and still is a 60s Mod floor filler.
Talking of French pop, we listened to the French cast version of Hair this morning. I recently picked up a copy on Discogs. I explained to John Scott that I have a bit of a thing for collecting different versions of the Hair soundtrack. It came out around the time I was born, and I’ve been a fan of its composer Galt MacDermot and his music for a long time. He has sadly passed away now, but the Canadian released lots of cool and interesting soundtracks and records. Mostly in a jazz-funk vein, and many on his own Kilmarnock label. Hip-hop producers have been sampling him for years and that fact, along with the quality of the music, has made many of his records expensive items should you wish to own originals. Even some reissues command top dollar.
Anyway, moving on. I wanted to give a proper shout out and plug for a record that we got in here a while ago and that has been growing on me each time I’ve given it a spin.
Ville Valavuo: Commemoration Songs. Ultraääni Records
I know that we often talk about punk and hardcore bands from Finland, but not so much the jazz and funk that comes out of the country. It’s no secret that all of us here love Finland, its people and for that matter the rest of Scandinavia. The guys have been over there more recently, but I still have fond memories of my visits years ago back in the 90s when I worked on the ships. Over the years I’ve discovered a lot of great music coming out of Finland that was in a jazz and funk vein. Most folks may have heard of Jimi Tenor, perhaps. He’s terrific and has been making interesting music for over three decades now. Sort of future jazz if you like, with electronic influences. Warp Records was a good label for him. His partner, Nicole Willis, has put out some great soul and funk records backed by the Finnish band Soul Investigators. Members of that group are behind one of my favorite record labels, Timmion Records, which has consistently released cool and interesting records. One of their releases, TR-78 by Didier’s Sound Spectrum, released in the early 00s, is one of my desert island discs. Such a good record. Funky, instrumental album that sounds like a lost soundtrack or sound library record from the 70s that was made by musicians who were time traveling back from the future. If that makes any sense?
So, fast forward to this year and the Ville Valavuo album. Recorded over several sessions last year in Helsinki and mixed at the beginning of this, it’s a one-man band effort as far as I can tell. Credit for all instrumentation, programming, recording, mixing and layout go to the artist. He’s a guitarist and visual artist associated with several groups and projects, the majority of which I admit to not being familiar with. When we received copies of Commemoration Songs here at the store, Danny said to me that I might like this one. He was correct. It’s categorized as an avant-garde jazz album on Discogs, which I suppose is correct, although that tag typically makes me approach with caution. Ha, ha. I’m not actually a big free jazz lover as it goes. When things get too crazy and out there, I tend to lose interest. I prefer structure, melody and my saxophones not to sound like a gaggle of geese being strangled, if possible. Mercifully, there isn’t tortured honking going on with this one. The vibe is more laid-back and spiritual. If you have been enjoying the records made by Nala Sinephro, which incorporate electronic instrumentation to give the music a spacey, magical feel, then you’ll probably like this Ville Valavuo record.
The album consists of eight tracks, four per side that are variations on a theme that comments on the commodification of the world at the expense of human rights. A world where making money is the all-important thing. A world where our consumerism only helps keep the systems in place that hurt us. The music here is supposed to provide the listener sanctuary from all of that. Honestly, I think that has been accomplished. Like all of us, I have found the state of the world a lot to handle currently, and being able to immerse oneself into a headspace for a few minutes that takes you out of that and transports you to another place is very much welcomed. I’ve put this record on the turntable several times and have found myself flipping it a couple of times before taking it off and finding something else. You don’t have to do that. One listen at a time will still take you away for the thirty-odd minutes that the record lasted. It’s a good one to have on late at night or even early in the morning when you are reading, for instance.
At around the same time that this record came to us here at the shop, I picked up a couple of 45s that one of our distros had copies of. Two slices of more up-tempo, Mod-leaning jazz that also comes out of Finland. Both singles were released on the New Look Records label, which is an offshoot of Timmion Records, the label I mentioned previously. The music on these comes from The Jukka Eskola Soul Trio and The Sami Linna Quartet. I liked both. If you had told me both had been recorded back in the late 1960s or early 1970s instead of 2019, I would have easily believed you. Really nice soul jazz. Jukka Eskola plays trumpet, and Sami Linna is a guitarist, backed with a grooving rhythm section, nice percussion and organ. All four sides are winners. Time to discover Finnish jazz if you haven’t already. You’ll need something to act as a sorbet between courses of crushing hardcore. Right? Check them out and see what you think.
Okay, I must cut this off now. The deadline has already passed, and Daniel fines us whenever we submit late. He’s a hard taskmaster. Just kidding. He is, of course, the best boss ever.
Cheers guys. See you next time.
-Dom