jouni's pipe dreams

press release

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Artist: Jouni Järvelä, Lenny Pickett, Pepa Päivinen & Jonatan Sarikoski 

Title: Jouni’s Pipe Dream
Release Date: October 20, 2023
URL: www.jounispipedreams.com

Formats: CD & digital
CD/digital available at Bandcamp: jounispipedream.bandcamp.com
Digital album available at all major streaming platforms and download stores

Contact and booking: www.jounispipedreams.com
Distributed by Eclipse Music / The Orchard: www.eclipsemusic.com

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Lenny Pickett, Jouni Järvelä, Pepa Päivinen and Jonatan Sarikoski announce new album: 

Jouni’s Pipe Dream

(Release Date: October 20; CD and digital download; available on all streaming services)

What do you call music for a quartet of three reed players with a drummer, music with not just a backbeat—and complex funk rhythms—but swagger, contrapuntal lines from warm, soulful saxophones played with a hip strut? According to saxophonist and composer Lenny Pickett, “It's chamber music. Chamber music with mixed winds and percussion.”

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That’s the music on the new album of new music by Pickett and Finnish saxophonist and composer Jouni Järvelä Jouni’s Pipe Dream, released by Järvelä on the new Jouni’s Pipe Dreams label. Pickett and Järvelä composed the music (ten and three pieces, respectively), but the album as a whole is a collaboration of the whole ensemble, completed by reed player Pepa Päivinen and drummer Jonatan Sarikoski. The four have been frequent musical partners over the past fifteen years, which comes through in the camaraderie and mastery of the playing.

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Jouni’s Pipe Dream is also something of a rarity; a full album from Pickett, the former star tenor sax soloist in Tower of Power, and long-time music director of the Saturday Night Live band. Joining a small, potent discography that includes Lenny Pickett with the Borneo Horns (Hannibal, 1987), The Prescription with UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra (Random Act Records, 2014), and Bad Dreams (Lenny Pickett Music, 2017), the album is a chance to hear this phenomenal, powerful player close up, every inflection and nuance of timbre full of meaning, excitement, and satisfaction.

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Talking about the album, both Pickett and Järvelä emphasize the chamber music idea. Pickett points out that, “it's similar to quartet writing in that the cueing is all internal. There's no conducting, we cue each other at different points along the way for stylistic variation, we listen to each other for articulation and for dynamics. And in just the same way that in a string quartet cueing is going on.” Järvelä chimes in on how the multiple voices have a near-baroque structure, adding that “bits and pieces from here and there overlap.” Talking about the interplay of the rhythms and contrapuntal lines, he adds, “It is quite amazing how big, like a full orchestra, a saxophone trio can sound.”

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But there’s much, much more than counterpoint going on here. Music from Pickett means something that brings together funk, soul, rock, blues, and jazz in a style synthesized through the long tradition of polyphony, from the Renaissance through minimalism. The titles are deceptively abstract, “Music for three saxophones & percussion” in six different movements, three movements of a “Clarinet trio,” but the woodwind phrases and articulations are punchy, the drums cracking along with the rhythms that are tightly integrated with the horns, shifting through pulses in the way of sophisticated funk and, well, chamber music. Just listen for the classic Tower-of-Power-esque horn cadence at the end of “Music for three saxophones & percussion IV” and hear music that has a little Bach, a little Stravinsky, a heavy bottom, some gutbucket blowing from the reeds, and the sparkling, glowing major chord finale of a classic ToP ballad.

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Fluid and with windows for each of the players to add their personal touches and improvisations, Pickett praises how Sarikoski’s drumming doesn’t just keep the beat but slices out pieces of time for the reeds to play with and through. “It's a little bit different in that with the addition of a percussionist you have a steady beat going on,” he says, comparing the group to something like a string quartet. “But even that's responsive to the rest of the musicians. It's not a metronomic kind of performance, it's more organic than that.”

Järvelä’s titles are a perfect complement, and they compliment the musicians; “‘80s Pop for L.P.” is one track, “Jonatan Sarikoski” is another. Just as earthy, slippery, and funky as Pickett’s pieces, the music cements the close musical relationship the two have had for years, including The Prescription— Järvelä has been in UMO (Finland’s only full-time professional big band) since the 1990s, and has held the lead alto chair since 2011. The album title is his too, as he explains, it “was guided by happenstance."

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“Our recording engineer Jyri Riikonen saved all of session audio for us on a memory stick, and he had, on his own, labeled it ‘Jouni’s Dream.’ It would be any sensible saxophonist’s and musician’s dream to work and record with Lenny and this music, and it was kind of lovely and slightly amusing.” When the two musicians talked about the album title, Pickett suggested “Jouni’s Dream,” and Järvelä “thought it needed something more concrete though not so cen- tered on me, and then I remembered the English expression, ‘pipe dream.’”

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To Järvelä, the expression brought together his own time and efforts into making the album happen, what he describes as the “dreamt-up” nature of the music, the pursuit of the unobtainable—though well-achieved here—and the woodwind ‘pipes’ the musicians played.” He also jokes, “a pipe dream could serves as a motto for my new label and future releases!”

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From the seemingly unobtainable to the fully realized, more than just the music, the album is a testament to focus on details, everything from where it was recorded to the typography on the album cover. The sessions took place at E- studio in Helsinki Finland, July 3-6, 2017. Decades ago it was a movie theater, Järvelä points out, and this recording was the last session before the long-lived studio was closed and rebuilt in a new location. Pickett praises both the space and the technology: “The studio was like an an interesting relic of the ‘70s,” he says. “it had the old-school acoustic treatment with a technically sophisticated recording room and with very good sound in the studio itself, it was a really important aspect of the recording process. That just works better in a room like that—it was the right combination of acoustics, and the the technology was very good too. We had a very nice mic locker with very good large diaphragm condenser mics, that made a big difference in the quality of the sound.”

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Pickett also points out this was a live recording, with no overdubbing and an old-school method in collaboration with Riikonen. Though multitracked, they ran the session as if recording to 2-track tape, editing—when needed—along the way, by listening to a segment of playback and then dropping in a new take, with a focus on the natural, flowing feel- ing of long takes. And he also praises the mixing and mastering by Paul Wickliffe at Skyline Productions in Warren, New Jersey: “it’s expert and really plays a large part in the result, it's clearly a collaboration between the recording engineers and musicians.”

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And there’s the CD’s graphic design (though pressed only on CD, there will be a LP-size cover sleeve with a four-page insert of album information and session photos—the CD fits inside—available on Bandcamp). Järvelä invited Lauri Toikka, from the award-winning Schick-Toikka design firm, to create the look: “They were very accomplished font designers (and Lauri likes our music). I had this association of fonts with our way of playing—continuous and dense streams of carefully carved notes,” shaping lines and curves with “‘small strokes or extensions at the end of its longer strokes,’ in the definition of the font serif —we do play serifs, even if we chose fonts that are sans!”

Järvelä praises the contributions of Päivinen and Sarikoski. The third horn player on the album is, he says, “one of the true top-notch baritone saxophonists worldwide.” An emeritus member of UMO, “Pepa’s playing and sound seems to combine the best of the rich, powerful, yet incredibly nuanced ways of playing the baritone, from the Harry Carney influence or Gerry Mulligan characteristics to all the resonant and expressive free-jazz saxophone approaches.” Päivinen has been a long-time collaborator with the great free jazz musicians Edward Vesala and Iro Haarla.

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Järvelä also explains that he met Sarikoski when the drummer was only 10 and at a big band festival. When a little older, Sarikoski “impressed late, great bassist Paul Jackson,” famed member of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band, “at a jam session with a truly powerful, free-flowing cascade of ideas. It wasn’t long before he became one of the most wanted young musicians in Helsinki, playing with UMO, then later settling in Vienna, where he has collaborated with a range of prominent artists that includes Wolfgang Muthspiel, Julian Argüelles, and Phil Robson.

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That’s a thing about Jouni’s Pipe Dream. It’s just four musicians, playing chamber music, and the implication of that word is something small and intimate. Intimate this is, in the sense of closeness and communication, but it sounds big, full of robust feeling, smart and fun in equal measures, internal communications meant for an outside audience as wide as possible. “I like the recording quite a bit,” Pickett adds in an understated way, “it’s kind of exotic. It’s got energy and it's got a vibe and smarts too.”