Savu (2015)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
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Ilkka Heinonen is one of the leading exponents of the jouhikko, the Finnish bowed lyre. It’s a beautiful instrument. It has a very guttural sound, and often quite a scratchy one too. Where this can often make an instrument sound rather fragile, I don’t think the jouhikko does; it sounds ancient and powerful, which is helped, I think, by the fact that out of the three (traditional) or four (modern) strings, one is always reserved as a drone string, which gives everything it plays a firm, meaty backbone. It’s quite a unique instrument too. The jouhikko has very few relatives around the world: the only other surviving bowed lyres in the world are the Estonian hiiu kannel and the Welsh crwth, and the latter is only played by a handful of medievalists. Even the jouhikko was on the verge of extinction before it was brought back into fashion by musicians such as Pekko Käppi, Rauno Nieminen and Heinonen himself.
The thing about a revival, though, is that it doesn’t just keep the instrument in the past, it embraces it as part of the modern traditions. For Pekko Käppi, that means bringing the jouhikko into a metal context (it is Finnish, after all); for Ilkka Heinonen, it means jazz. The Ilkka Heinonen Trio is Mikko Hassinen on drums and electronics, Nathan Riki Thomson on double bass and Heinonen on jouhikko. The compositions that the group play are very much influenced by Finnish traditional and folk music – they all have a spatiality to them, they are weighty yet echo as if carried by an icy breeze – but it’s all explored within a contemporary jazz idiom.
There are a few different moods at play on Savu, the trio’s first – and so far only – full album, from driving and jostling to quiet and complex (I like those the best), but there is one particular piece that I want to bring to your attention, the one that turns this album from a good album to a great one.
It’s called ‘Rutto’, which is Finnish for ‘plague.’ At first, that name may seem out-of-whack with the tune itself. It starts with a brisk march on the drums and a perky, if minor-key, melody on the jouhikko that always puts me a little bit in mind of ‘Sosban Fach’. Then the double bass enters, just stomping on that tonic note in time with the bass drum. There’s a slightly creepy semitone-heavy sections before it goes back to the first tune, and this time it’s even more strident, the march more aggressive and the bass more punchy. The repetition of the melody makes it fall into headbanging territory. But then things start to change, slowly and subtly. The bass becomes more distorted, the rhythm becomes less like a march and more like a nervous heartbeat, the jouhikko begins to lose its perkiness and starts slurring, its sharp bow strokes blurring into one. The whole thing begins to slide into some sort of madness, a scary and cacophonous noise. The sound itself becomes infected by the plague. By now the tune is almost a memory within the noise, barely discernible over layers of screeching harmonics, chaotic electronic sounds and wordless primal screams. Then quiet. The heartbeat remains and a percussion that sounds like a ticking clock. The sound sighs, like a release of pressure. And slowly, the melody as it was intended returns, with the same stridency as it once had before but perhaps with more of a frazzled energy. The knowledge of the devastation just past hangs heavy over the whole thing. And that way, with a crash of cymbals, the track ends.
It’s a fantastic composition, made of just two short melody fragments, but its deterioration and reformation tells a potent story through sound alone, and makes the piece completely gripping for nearly seven minutes of runtime. It is a real centrepiece of the album, and it shows how this ancient instrument, so indelibly connected to the tradition, can be used in a way that both honours that past while creating something that is stunningly, uncompromisingly and sometimes unsettlingly modern.
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