Couleurs Nordiques

Le Finlandais Esa Pietilä est en train de redéfinir les standards de l’avant-garde et réinvente le free jazz à sa façon. Le saxophoniste nous réserve encore quelques surprises.
Cela fait maintenant plus de 10 ans que le saxophoniste finlandais Esa Pietilä parfait son art de l’improvisation au sein d’un trio taillé sur mesure. Ce disciple de David Liebman est maintenant arrivé au terme d’une collaboration fructueuse avec ce trio qui nous a donné les albums Direct et Travel of Fulica Atra, et l’artiste a décidé d’élargir son lexique musical. "Avec Ulf [Krokfors, à la contrebasse] et Markku [Ounaskari, à la batterie], nous avons eu l’impression d’avoir amené cette formule à son maximum, constate-t-il. Il fallait transformer ce trio; l’ajout de la pianiste Iro Haarla est venu progressivement. Pour nous trois, c’est maintenant une toute nouvelle expérience."

Avec une esthétique bien personnelle, qui n’est peut-être pas étrangère à la géographie qui entoure ce passionné de navigation, le saxophoniste se distingue de l’avant-garde européenne typique (lire l’école italienne) et du son américain. Dans ses compositions, l’exposition des thèmes devient limpide et mélodique, mais se transforme dans un exercice d’improvisation totale. Difficile, en fait, de cerner son école de pensée musicale tellement son spectre d’expression est vaste.

"Je m’intéresse à beaucoup de choses. J’adore la musique classique, surtout des compositeurs modernes tels que György Ligeti et Stockhausen. Le compositeur polonais Lutoslawski aussi. Certaines idées de ces compositeurs sont passées dans le filtre de ma propre culture et de l’improvisation. C’est un processus qui est difficile à décrire tellement notre travail est devenu une seconde nature. Avec Ulf et Markku, nous avons eu le temps d’explorer amplement! Ce qui m’importe, ce n’est pas de sonner classique ou free jazz, mais bien d’exprimer qui je suis en musique."

En compagnie de la pianiste Iro Haarla (qui est aussi la conjointe d’Ulf Krokfors), l’expérience musicale orchestrée par Pietilä entame un nouveau chapitre. D’autres projets vont aussi s’ajouter pour le virtuose finlandais. "Avec le pianiste Michael Jefry Stevens et le violoncelliste Juho Laitinen, je suis en train de monter un nouveau répertoire. Le violoncelle est un instrument particulier, mais Juho est un improvisateur extraordinaire. Et juste avant de venir jouer à Québec, je vais enregistrer un disque avec le batteur Jeff Siegel: saxophone et batterie." Et l’expérience continue.

Antoine Lèveilleée / www.jazzaquebec.ca

FMQ interview/article, 2008  "Fiction from saxophone", by Jan-Erik Holmberg

"Saxophonist Esa Pietilä's music is heavily influenced by visual arts and poetry. When he plays, Pietilä blends his fantasy worldwith the real world...."

download page1 here (pdf) page2 here (pdf)

Jazzconvention, Italy, 2008, by Fabio Cimineira:

1. Let's start with your Esa Pietilä Trio. Could you tell us the story of the trio and how have you chosen the musicians?

The trio has been working together over seven years now, it started in 2000 because of musical reasons - I wanted to express myself more with the language of freejazz and avantgarde. At this point in 2000 for me there was really an emotional and artistic need to really change my expression a lot towards more communication between players plus adding more textures, sounds, elements of avantgarde style to my own playing and groups. The trio reflects in it´s own way to my "first love situation" which points to my teenages, when I was listening and admiring Albert Ayler, Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette and many others of the famous free players, but did not quite excatly understand then what they were doing. That was to be figured out later on with me...so forming this trio in 2000 was the result of getting back to my boyhood´s dream to express music more like that way.
About the musicians, Markku has been playing in my groups since the very beginning, which is 1988. Actually Uffe was also playing in the first quartet of mine in 1988, but he decided to go for Edward Vesala groups etc. playing more free already back then. In 2000 when I decided to form a new trio, it was obvious and an easy decision to ask him to join again to play with me. The reason is only musical, because he has a great skills to play freejazz and shares a vision of his own. Concequently, Markku had a vision of this expression too, and had started to play more to this genre of jazz with other groups, so it was obvious too that he would play with the trio.

2. I guess that this trio represent your way to directly express your voice. There is, in the tracks of the record, a strong will to express together your musical concepts, a connection tightest than a normal interplay.

Yes, You are right, because this is my number one steadily working band, so it gives me a freedom to express my ideas directly. I have always liked communication in jazz (and communication in music in general) With this trio, the listening to each others playing, and the rhythmic communication of the players just started to happen really tightly and intensively almost from the very beginning. And later on after we had started to perform regulary with the group, I had a picture in my head that it would be nice if this trio would soon perform more collective sound - to play sometimes like no one is really a soloist, and with listening a lot of each others contrapuntual ideas, lines and directions of them. It was really nice to notice soon that this kind of expression started to happen even earlier than I expected.

3. It's possible to hear, in the trio sound, many languages and experience, the acknowledgement of conventions and basic sound elements is combinated with avant-garde and experimentation. Let's talk about your musical point of view.

I try not to restrict my musical thinking to only one box of expression or way to play, meaning that everything that has a good dramaturgy, flow and movement affects me because I think these things have to be in the music. If the red line is missing when somebody is soloing (no matter what style) or in composition, then there´s no movement of form happening and no direction of music...Today, my musical point of view is (I hope ) every possible thing that my imagination can possibly create, but it´s mostly and strongly to the avantagarde and free side of performing & expressing. It is interesting since I´m a composer too, to notice that I hear the same kind of structures, forms and textures in my improvisations than in my compositions, so what I´m saying here is that I have learned a lot about improvisation & music through composing. I really like to think that improvising is like composing ( on the moment ), where You command the drama, sentencies, form and textures to their highs and vallies, to new sections and endings etc, and at the same time build a big structure...What comes to the basic sound elements and acknowledgement of conventions, I want to include them in my playing, because I want to respect the history of jazz, and secondly, I have noticed that when You experiment, the basic simple things work very well as a starting point for improvisation, it´s just only up to us what we want to do with them. They can still be developed to very complex things and stuctures, or if You just want to keep the simple and effective, with adding extra spicies (or some new element to them), it´s also nice like that. From a simple thing or and idea, You can create a symphony - there´s so many examples in this world about that. Let´s take the Sibelius number five symphony for example...An thirdly, I feel that I ´m a part of the evolution of jazz, becoming from somewhere, and putting my own expression and things to it. It´s  a free playground, and for an artist, it must be like that.