Gard Nilssen brings epic big band sonics to We Jazz Festival, Helsinki

Over the past decade, the We Jazz Festival has helped transform the Helsinki jazz scene, bringing in a palette of mostly European, free-oriented musicians to play alongside and collaborate with locals at offbeat venues. The 2023 edition’s final extravaganza did just that, with surprise twists – this time on four stages in a former tram depot from 1900.

The Saturday evening climaxed at midnight with Norwegian drummer Gard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra. This 17-headed Scandi behemoth seemed at times like a herd of stampeding elephants – only to stop on a sixpence and pirouette elegantly, always with a gleeful sense of swing. With its 11 horn players and triplicate rhythm section, the orchestra came off as a jollier, more melodic answer to raucous big bands led by Peter Brötzmann or Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra.

Gustafsson led a project earlier in the evening that featured many of the same musicians, each playing a short solo set in honour of late Swedish free jazz pioneer Bengt “Frippe” Nordström. The 13 soloists also included the festival’s artist-in-residence, US avant-garde saxophonist Darius Jones. The heavily white-male mini-festival’s only other non-European guests were the Brazilian duo of drummer/percussionist Mauricio Takara and electronic keyboardist Carla Boregas. They drew a rapt audience in the venue’s intimate attic bar with long improvisations that explored hypnotic, primordial drumming, delicate near-ambient moods and louder passages suggesting kosmische bands like Can and Faust.

There were heavier krautrock and post-rock influences from the Finnish trio Virta, formed in eastern Finland in 2011. Their electronic fusion sound is unlike anything else on the We Jazz label or the Helsinki scene, reflecting Finland’s unabashed love of heroic prog, heavy metal and dark drama. Think Sigur Rós meets Matthew Halsall with more electronics and edge, particularly the powerful drumming of Erik Fräki.

Less successful live was a new line-up of the Stance Brothers, a light-hearted, retro soul-jazz project led by drummer Teppo Mäkynen, long a core figure of the Helsinki scene and the We Jazz collective. The new Stance Brothers album, the first since 2007, turns toward vaguely bossa-tinged lounge music that comes off as exotica lite. While Mäkynen can be one of the city’s most exciting live drummers, the new line-up didn’t take off during the few tunes I caught. And with so much happening on three other stages, the festivalgoer must sometimes make the tough choice to move on.

In this case, the move paid off with a stellar set by saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen’s Magnetia Orkesteri. Trumpeter Verneri Pohjola explored his weirder, more experimental side, backed by his sometime duo partner Mika Kallio on gongs and drums and former Mopo bassist Eero Tikkanen. The one-on-ones between Pohjola and Kallio were the most spellbinding, Pohjola pushing the sonic boundaries of his instrument and Kallio’s gongs apparently triggering a sympathetic poltergeist that set glasses crashing behind the rear bar.