Goran Kajfeš Tropiques (SE)

Something quite miraculous happened last May – a Finnish album release, Tell Us, by Helsinki-based We Jazz, won the traditional Orkesterjournalen magazine Golden Album Reader’s Choice Award for best Swedish jazz album of the year. And this happened coincidentally the same week that the Finnish trio KAJ represented Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest.

However, the win for the Tropiques ensemble, which is led by trumpetist and composer Goran Kajfeš (b. 1970), wasn’t quite as big a sensation, because Kajfeš has been one of the top jazz musicians in Sweden for twenty years, when he launched his solo career, starting out right at the top. At that time, the combined styles of his album Headspin (2004) immediately impressed listeners in Sweden, winning him the Grammis (the Swedish equivalent of a Grammy) for best jazz album. However, Kajfeš’s personal best is probably his double album X/Y (2010) by his own ensemble Subtropic Arkestra, which was selected after a multi-stage evaluation process for the best of the Nordic countries – he was the only jazz candidate in the entire competition, even beating out Nordic pop and rock stars.

The names of Kajfeš’s own groups based in Stockholm – ‘Subtropic Arkestra’ and ‘Tropiques’ – suggest that they have more in common than their founder-leader. And of course they do, because they grow from the same kind of rhythmic musical soil: plural and undefined, minimalist and maximalist.

But which of his ensembles is hotter, more humid and more tropical? Tropiques, which has recorded three albums so far, may sound a bit cooler at first, but it ultimately keeps the heat on longer, by playing more extended meditative melodic and cosmic mixes. In fact, the the ensemble’s first album Enso (2017) had only one track with a run time little less than an hour. In Tampere, Goran Kajfeš Tropiques is going to perform music from its third and latest album Tell Us (2024), all three tracks – and, time permitting, perhaps even something more.