Piirpauke - Piirpauke (1975/2007 Remastered Edition)
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Album: Piirpauke - Piirpauke (Remastered Edition)
Released: 1975 (2007)
Genre: Folk-, Prog-, Jazz-Rock
Gnosis Rating: 9.97
Love Records - LRCD 148
Progressive rock, folk-jazz, world music; all these tags have been tied to Piirpauke over the years, each appropriate on one hand and restrictive on the other... - Finland Music Reviews
Wonderfully enigmatic work from the Finnish scene of the 70s -- music that has roots in folk, but expression in some of the more fusion-based styles of the time! Many of the titles here are traditional themes from China, Bali, Romania, and elsewhere -- but they're played in a somewhat contemporary mode that features plenty of wooden flute and soprano sax, plus guitar, piano, bass, drums, and lots of assorted percussion. All tracks are instrumentals, and all are pretty long -- taking the core themes almost as a platform for longer jamming -- starting out in modes that still keep the original melodies, then fly out with more jazz-based improvisation. - Dusty Groove
Long before such eclectic artists like Boiled in Lead and Reptile Palace Orchestra tantalized discerning listeners with their unique brand of rock-driven ethno-fusion, and even before Brave Combo was recognized as leading purveyors of offbeat world music, there existed a little known band from Finland. Piirpauke was formed in the early seventies and continues to this day. They specialize in combining folk melodies from throughout Europe and the Mid East with Latin rhythms, a rock beat and a free-jazz mindset. The jazz element does dominate some of the earlier recordings as leader Sakari Kukko hails from a jazz background, however, as this band progressed so did their musical influences and performance style. If that’s problematic for you but this description intrigues you, try their mid eighties period as a starting point. Albums like THE WILD EAST and particularly ALGAZARA are loaded with diverse sounds like the Romanian “Turceasca,” the beautiful Finnish traditional piece “Kantele” and their rendition of Wolfgang Mozart’s “Rondo a la Turca.” Indeed, Piirpauke creates compelling music for discriminating tastes. - Dave Sleger
Piirpauke is a Finnish band that combines folk music, ethno and jazz in their music. The band was founded by Sakari Kukko in 1974 and over the years, a number of musicians from various countries have played in the band. Some of their most famous songs include Konevitsan kirkonkellot, Soi vienosti murheeni soitto, Swedish Reggae and Imala Maika. The band has toured throughout the world and has played at such major music festivals as Provinssirock, Ruisrock and Pori Jazz in Finland. - Wikipedia
Truly pioneers in the world-music scene, Piirpauke fuse traditional Finnish folk forms with motifs and rhythms from Latin, Caribbean, Arabic, and Asian musical styles. Starting out in the mid-'70s, Piirpauke have remained insistently eclectic, and their range of influences can stretch to encompass Senegalese drumming and Andalucian singing on a single disk. - Leon Jackson, AMG
PIIRPAUKE has been a pioneer of World Music for so long, that some people might take the band for granted.Piirpauke has always been changing - not following fashions but pursuing new fresh interests and ideas from band leader Sakari Kukko.Somehow Piirpauke always manages to make the diverse material sound like their own... - World Music Central
Sakari Kukko founded the band in 1974 to live out his musical ideas which would not stop at cultural or genre borders. Piirpauke was one of the first bands to bring together European and Ethnic Music. Today, Piirpauke still can fascinate its audience with its blend of Rock, Jazz and Ethno/Folk Music... - FolkWorld News
27 years ago, when most people had never even heard about world music, much less heard it or played it, Sakari Kukku (saxophones, flutes, keybords, percussion, vocals) started to do it with his band PIIRPAUKE. Springing from the solid bottom of jazzy improvisation, rock'n'rolling attitude and the ancient echoes of Finnish folk melodies the band dived into the ocean that is the sum total of whole mankind's music.
In a quarter of a century - time flies, doesn't it? - the personnel and the musical main ingredients of Piirpauke, have changed many times, but the spirit of exploration had stayed the same.
When asked what it actually is that keeps him interested in this world music thing even after such a long time, Sakari doesn't have to think for long. "It's the very same thing that I realized 25 years ago, when I started to research the world's different musics. It dawned on me in a big way that I was digging at a treasure chest that really has no bottom. I mean, I've been digging ever since and there is not the slightest feeling of having exhausted this thing. It's simply impossible to exhaust it".
"Working the different traditions and styles from different parts of the world you get there realizations how seemingly disparate things go together. Things just click into place. It really makes you think about oneness of mankind. Often I can't help feeling that I've arrived at sounds, melodies or rhythms that speak to man's deepest core. Way past all boundaries."
Roughly ten years ago PIIRPAUKE trimmed down, for practical reasons, to the basic trio of the Finnish Kukko, Andalusian singer/guitarist Cinta Hermo and Senegalese percussionist/singer Ismaila Sane from a sextet of two years, which included jazz drummer Markku Ounaskari, electric bass player Tauno Railo and the legendary guitar virtuoso Jukka Tolonen, whose solo albums made him an international star already tn the 70's. The latter three are all Finnish musicians.
PIIRPAUKE's road manager J-P Laatikainen is an excellent drummer - so don't be surprised if you see him sometimes behind the drum kit or on percussion. PIIRPAUKE, you see, is an animal, whose evolution is still far from finished. "We had a meeting with all the players recently, and the vibes were really good. People could hardly wait to get to play. They kept insisting we have plenty of long rehearsals", Sakari laughs. "We're really gonna get down on stage", he promises. With the caliber of these musicians, it will be something to hear.
"The material that we're going to do, is divided into three basic categories. Maybe 35% will be history, another 35% will be stuff from the trio and the sextet periods, while the rest will be new material especially written for this personnel, plus Cinta is going to do a couple of solo numbers."
So get ready for the real world music. There will definitely be no soft-shoe-shuffling around the edges with two-penny machines beats, like you hear on every other commercial there days. - ProgNews
The silhouette of the Sun, behind a wide open bay on the lake, the Sun's still glimmering 'though evening has arrived at Kuhmo. It's mid-summer; the living room has its instruments and other objects in each of its comers. Sakari Kukko sits at the piano accompanying his Filipino friend Sheila, who sings an odd, would-be folkloric song by V?in?m?inen of Vimpeli, a very elderly folk musician from Ostrobothnian area in the early 70's: "and they brought lilacs to the feet of Jesus at the temple". 33 years of modern folkloristjc cosmopolitanism: mid-summer sun, folk musics, Sibelius and free improvisation are there in perfect unison as if they would have always been. But why couldn't it seem like that, after tens and tens of thousands kilometres, travelling, playing nearly all of the globe's continents and collecting folk music through local radio stations, Sakari Kukko is finally back where he in the year of 1953 saw the daylight for the first time.
Now for more than three decades writers and critics have tried - in vain - to describe this music you are now privileged to hear, hopefully for the first time, and definitely first time with this splendid new remastering. Dizzy Gillespie put it aptly one time by declaring that bebop as a genre of music never existed. There was Miles Davis music, Thelonious Monk music, Charlie Parker music. Some 20 years later in this Nordic world-corner, there was Pekka Pohjola music, Tasavallan Pr?sidents music and Piirpauke music. Pohjola was a bit more influenced by classical music, Tasavallan Presidents by Anglo-American pop and rock music and Piirpauke by ethnic folk musics. Each of them had modem jazz and free improvisation as one of their cornerstones. And they all made music that has survived easily for more than 30 years and which will continue to be acknowledged as timeless classics as the next decades pass by.
So, instead of trying to capture one form of music in a suffocating cage of "a name, a label or a genre", one could approach a much more challenging question. What makes a work of art timeless, even immortal? Like the new forms of social life, new forms or preferably trans-forms of music are bom in the womb of the old ones. In middle 70's all these musicians were under 30 and in search of finding themselves in and through this music. The obvious alternative would have been to follow the American jazz tradition into the fusion era, but hopefully they preferred another way - fusion of old melodies and new ways of improvisation. One of the major mentors of Piirpauke was Edward Vesala (1945-1999). He used to define most jazz in the neighbourhood as "monkey music". Vesala encouraged Piirpauke to move towards folk musics and anticipated correctly the arousing social demand for this music.
The middle 70's will remain in Finnish cultural history as a paradoxical period of cultural creativity and political right-mindedness, even fanaticism. The radical, left-wing student movement quickly took a very different route from its German or French counterparts. Transforming a cultural and political movement into the aims of a hierarchically organized political Communist party and declaring the Soviet State as the true idol can now be ridiculed, or denied, or critically recognized. State centeredness has been a peculiar Finnish malady. Even today for many the demarcation line of the state and civil society is hard to draw.
However, the radicalisms of the 60's and 70's carried another dimension: the solidarity towards people in the Third World and also to prisoners, the insane and other discriminated groups inside our society. In this movement towards solidarity Piirpauke represented its perfect musical counterpart. On more personal and practical level, Sakari Kukko and Hasse Walli as well, have for decades been major forerunners in employing and creating conditions for immigrant musicians to get into the limelight of the Finnish music scene, Sakari in Piirpauke and Hasse in Asamaan.
So, those political aims and passions have been left behind, for better and for worse. But why has this music survived and reached its timeless quality? Before answering this question, let me shortly describe the pieces on this first album of Piirpauke (the name was picked from the Karelian oral dictionary of Sakari Kukko's father, meaning noise and hullabaloo, which, by the way, doesn't apply to the actual sonoric landscape drawn by these musicians at all).
The first piece Kuunnousu (The Ascent of the Moon) features Sakari's soprano saxophone throughout this short piece. It is based on traditional Rumanian melody, full of hope and optimism. The first long piece Legong begins as a Balinese song carried by dancing wooden flutes. The second part starts with the deep and full bodied bass solo by Antti Hytti and moves then towards a free form percussive improvisation by all members of the quartet (notice the clay drums and gopijantra played by Jukka Wasama!). Finally the bass directs the players back to the Balinese melody. These two pieces are followed what I would not hesitate calling three masterpieces of the 70's World Music. The East meets the West (in national and global terms) as Sakari's wooden flute is accompanied by Hasse's electric guitar and the tempo is hastened into dervilish dimensions, 'though Uusi laulu paimenille (New Song for the Shepherds) is "a contemporary Chinese which is based on old national heritage". The only original composition on this cd, Cybele by Kukko, includes three breathtaking elements: an opening improvisation puts us into a raga-like Indian atmosphere, which is surprisingly changed by stating the main melody on Walli's guitar. This part carries us nearest to the sound world of mainstream European fusion music of the 70's, at its highest level. Walli's guitar solo shows an undeniable musicality, which culminates with a coda, where he unexpectedly even transforms the sound of his instrument. And finally, there is the sometime national anthem of solidaristic student movement of the 70's Church Bells of Konevitsa Monastery. The mythic levels here are beyond verbal expression. The actual musical representation shows how Hasse Walli's guitar solo is fulfilled to its excellence by Romanowski's "wind synthesizer", Kukko's raindrop-like piano and the next decade's musical celebrity, conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen's French horn.
One time there was the now worn out vinyl, then the first cd version of 1989 and now this remastering. After some hundreds of listenings the idea is becoming clear: no names, no labels, and no ideologies. This is quite like I heard it the first time, amazing and fresh music. It seems not to be intended, and definitely not be stated in political or whatsoever terms. This music is carried by the spirit of humanity, the true essence of timelessness - and let me add: as such it again and again represents the anticipation of global peace and democracy. - "Beyond Borders and Politics" by Markku "Jazz Preacher" Salo
1 Kuunnousu (03:32)
2 Legong (10:52)
3 Uusi laulu paimenille (05:36)
4 Cybele (10:52)
5 Konevitsan kirkonkellot (05:08)
SAKARI KUKKO soprano saxophone, piano, flute, clay drum
HASSE WALLI guitar, bowed guitar, maracas
ANTTI HYTTI bass, Indian harmonium
JUKKA WASAMA drums, percussion
OTTO ROMANOWSKI synthesizer (2, 4, 5)
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN French horn (5)
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