Mikko Innanen’s Celebration Ensemble: Jazz Finland 100 Now! (FI)

As many people may already know, jazz is said to have arrived in Finland and Helsinki exactly one hundred years ago. On the evening of Friday, 4 June 1926, the steamship Andania that had left New York loaded with Finnish-American tourists dropped anchor in Kruunuvuorenselkä bay.

The more than 600 passengers on the Andania also included young American-Finnish musicians who had been introduced to the authentic jazz of the era, above all 20-year-old saxophonist and clarinet player Tommy Tuomikoski. He and a few others stayed in Helsinki for the summer to play gigs and show their Finnish colleagues how things were done in America.

This is a good story. Or is it too good to be true?

Yes and no, because jazz-type music had certainly already been heard in Finland before. But the arrival of the Andania recorded in history books was certainly a major event. Some 10,000 Finns gathered in Eteläsatama harbour and the Market Square to welcome the travellers from far away – in Helsinki where the population in 1926 only numbered around 160,000 people, a quarter of what it is today.

While the impetus for the Celebration Ensemble put together and led by saxophonist Mikko Innanen (b. 1978) is specifically this historical ‘starting point’, the band has not gone back quite so far at its concerts, let alone played so-called traditional jazz. In Innanen’s words: “Jazz music is an interesting crystallisation of sensitivity and rage, spirituality and corporeality, in other words humanity. Contradiction and multidimensionality are such basic characteristics of existence that without them, all you have is a colourless dry husk – a hollow and miserable caricature of existence”.

The semi-official celebration quintet has already played at four other jazz festivals this year, mostly focusing on works by Finnish composers who are alive and still performing – in order of their age, they include Heikki Sarmanto, Eero Koivistoinen, Iro Haarla, Aki Rissanen, Aili Ikonen and Linda Fredriksson. At the celebration concert of the Tampere Jazz Happening, the composers may already be partly different, same as the visiting soloists.