Pauli Lyytinen Lehto/Korpi (FI)

Last spring, the five candidates vying for Finland’s most prestigious jazz award also included two exceptional albums. Indeed, it is rare that even one such album is released in Finland each year. And even more exceptionally, the expert jury for the Jazz Emma prize chose one of them as the winner – saxophonist and composer Pauli Lyytinen’s solo album Lehto/Korpi (2024). The other solo album was Chronovariations (2025) by saxophonist and composer Heli Hartikainen. The Finnish Critics’ Association awarded this album its own Critics’ Spurs prize in April.

A solo album is a vague concept that rarely refers to musical solos or even the fact that the title musician is the only one contributing to the album. However, Pauli Lyytinen’s (b. 1983) two-sided Lehto/Korpi is quite literally a solo album. He has composed and played everything on his own, also blazing his own trail, as it were, within his chosen motifs, the different types of forest. In other words, Lehto [Grove] and Korpi [Backwoods] are pieces about nature and, to some extent, incorporate nature, as Lyytinen integrates the field recordings he made himself. The forest creaks and cracks, the drizzle hisses, the birds twitter, and at least one of the tracks on Korpi sounds like Lyytinen clucks on his soprano saxophone with a swan calling out in the distance – at the same time and in the same landscape.

In Telakka, with its timbered roof and wooden floor, this song naturally melds into another kind of landscape – urban nature. But, perhaps with a little stretch of the imagination, you might just feel like you’re in a cottage on the shore of a lake.