Pekka Pohjola is awesome! Never heard of him until now. I will be listening to a whole lot more from Pekka Pohjola. Thank you Justin for playing and reacting to this album. The first cut was amazing.
Thanks for this gift JP. What I love about Pekka’s compositions is the melodies, those Nordic type ones (I live next door to Finland) arranged in so many styles but still being cohesive. There’s orchestral, folk, prog, fusion, rock. May I suggest his three first albums: Pihkasilmä Kaarnakorva Harakka Bialoipokku Keesojen Lehto or why not something from the bands he was part of; Wigwam and Made in Sweden.
Kate Bush! Pekka is our national treasure! So glad to see you like his music as well - he's one of my biggest inspirations for sure. All the best from Finland and thanks for the video!
I'm Finnish and I can tell you that Pekka was a genius and a revered figure in our musical landscape. He's by far my favorite of our musician/composers, saw him live a few times. Please check out the Urban Tango album - totally brilliant and very different from Visitation. And it contains a tune called Heavy Jazz - a term you used here to describe Strange Awakening! And the tune called Risto, from his Space Waltz album. On that track, guitarist Seppo Tyni plays a stunning solo that should be in the annals of guitar playing. Pekka was a shy, withdrawn person who sadly passed away in the early 2000's, after decades of battling alcohol addiction - very Finnish, unfortunately 😢
Great choice! You should try also Pohjola's song Imppu's Tango from his album Urban Tango. Pekka's music is very "visual" and storytelling. A lot of influences from Finnish nature and even Sibelius!
"Visitation" is probably Pekka Pohjola's artistic peak, but it's difficult to agree on, because he made so many beautiful and exciting albums. "Try to remember" is certainly my all time favorite track from this composer/musician.
Just bought the original LPs of this and 'Magpie' ($20 each on eBay, a steal), I collect anything prog and came to him from Wigwam. I am blown away at how good both LPs are. Really dig the opener here, too. Definitely hear a 'Peaches En Regalia' Zappa thing.
Pekka is a Nordic progg/jazzrock legend and pioneer, besides a bass virtuoso and leader of his own bands, he also played a lot with Jukka Tolonen (another Finish legend in these genres), and with the last instalment of the band Made in Sweden, featuring Jojje Wadenius and Wlodek Gulgowski, among others. Lots of videos here on YT. As with other Nordic artists in this area, there's a lot of peculiar melodics owing to the Nordic folk music tradiutions, with a distinct melancolic feel. All of the musicians you mention here are stellar Finish players in jazz and rock from this time. One (in)famous story about Pekka is that he turned down a straight offer to join the Zappa band with the open motivation that the music was "too much bullshit".
Another lost opportunity. Pekka Pohjola was also offered a place in Zappa's band. Made In Sweden was asked by ABBA to be their backing band on the oncoming US tour. They or Pohjola and drummer Vesa Aaltonen, declined the music being too pop - oriented.
@@onsesejoo2605 His career did contain the occasional pop recording though. Here he is backing Muska together with Wigwam bandmates Ronnie Österberg (drums) and Jukka Gustavson (piano) and a trio of jazz horn players also signed to Love records at the time: th-cam.com/video/71lvqDSbT60/w-d-xo.html
There is one Finnish band you really need to react to, 22-Pistepirkko, very different music from Pekka but one of the best bands to come out of Finland.
Wigwam and Tasavallan Presidentti were two other jazzy-prog-type Finnish bands from the 70s. They get a bit tedious from time to time, but they do have their moments of brilliance. For a complete switch in musical motifs, you could try the Hurriganes, from about the same time period. ps - for Finnish pronunciation, there are two rules: the emphasis/stress is always on the first syllable of any word, and all letters in a word are pronounced/enunciated. If you see double vowels or double consonants, both letters are sounded.
Thanks JP for this reaction! There is not much Pekka Pohjola reaction in TH-cam, and yours was absolutely killer, good analysis. My favorite Pekka album for sure and Strange Awakening probably my favorite song from Pekka. PS. Kate Bush!
"Playful" was a good description. Interesting, generally fresh, and held my interest, throughout; in the tradition of great jazz. Definitely not for every occasion, but it works well for certain moods (I can imagine putting this on while I was woodworking, cooking, or listening while sitting in a small club at an early evening show). Kate Bush says "Y'know, I might suggest not attempting dancing to this" (well, just in my imagination).
:D Yes, it's definitely inspiring me to hear more (although I'm messing round with other things at the same time today - but the music makes me pause every now and again, so it's not just "background"). This is good Schist, as the geologists say. Very Gneiss.
The artist is Katryn Bosch, I think. Looks similar, anyway. The more I hear, the more I become sure that this album or this group must have been a big influence on *Mr Bungle* (or at least their *Carousel* epoch - not quite so much on *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny* ). I think maybe even Tim Smith listened to them. (But maybe the whole circus music sound was popular at the time, and lots of people picked up on it. Could've even been the theme song of some popular TV series making little worm tunnels into musician's inner ears, and then reappearing at album scale later on.
Something made me think of *Die Trein Na Pretoria* (The Train to Pretoria), a song my mother and her siblings have made fun of since they were children. Unfortunately I can't think how on Earth this popped into my head. It's just an old 'sad-country' song with a bit of ox wagon in it. The conductor see a little girl on the train. She doesn't have a ticket. Even if she walks, she has to get to Pretoria, because her mother's there, sick and dying. He feels sorry for her and pays for her ticket. Mom dies, there's a heap of sand, and the conductor's heart breaks again, so he adopts the little girl. End of song. I think what my Mom and them picked up on about this when they were kids was that people would listen to that song just to _make_ themselves feel sad, and cry - which is a weird thing it's not uncommon for reasonably normal humans to do. The singers put a bit of extra misery in their voices, though. Anyway, naughty kids might find this funny, and long before I ever heard the song itself, I've heard old revived naughty kids sing it in wavering, ancient, sad-granny voices, and never manage to finish because of the laughter. OK, so that's not helping me remember why I'd remember something like Die Trein Na Pretoria. (Actually a modern a cappella-ish group made a record of songs by the group responsible for the song at one stage. They called themselves, "Die Grafsteensingers" - meaning, "the grave stone singers" - so even the fans of Die Briels mock them, it would seem. (The band was Die Briels - "the Briel family" basically). I'm in a few minds about those songs, these days. Yes, they're funny-sad (because they're made purely to give the listener some nice tears to weep), but there's something slightly real-sad about them, too. In a whole-of-humanity kind of way, since the experience of life out of which some things grow is not just part of the past or one little forlorn and frosty, dusty, dry and hopeless corner of some particular corner of this Earth. In the case of that song, the singers would have probably known people who saw our concentration camps (Lord Kitchener came up with a practical way of dealing with rebels who wouldn't just admit they'd lost and surrender. Unfortunately it killed children and so sowed all sorts of bitterness for the whole of the future following this.) The "Boers" of those times were very poor. (Just like most people here, since it's just that kind of place if you remove the treasure chests from the equation. Not helped by the fact that it was full of wanderers of all kinds. Lots of refugees always.) Properly poor, the way people who've been properly poor would know. No shoes for school, for instance. Shoes are for Sunday, and don't scuff them. Poor and raised on memories of how everything was destroyed (all from one point of view, yes, but when you're properly poor you tend not to see the big picture. You need to at least live in a world where you take it for granted that tomorrow morning there will be breakfast for that kind of vision. It's produced in the stomach, more than in the mind.) Ja, ja, so it's these very poor, barely educated, terribly sad old frail little grannies, who sometimes seem to actually enjoy being depressed, bumping up against a new world that's leaving them behind. And then The Briels find a way of making a reasonable living by singing to that; and the naughty little hells who would _never_ sneak onto the train so that they can go and say goodbye to _their_ dying mothers in Pretoria, find something funny about this and make fun of it. Naughty little hells were still going to school barefoot at the time, but that's what everyone does, so it was no big deal. I suppose I'd better give a link to anyone who survived this far down this failed attempt to track down how Die Trein Na Pretoria popped into my head, while listening to some next-level prog. It's short, so shouldn't hurt too much. th-cam.com/video/iVZavq1vlNY/w-d-xo.html ED. I can do translations if required, but I think I'll work on the assumption that they're not needed right now. ED. 2. Ah! I gave the artist's name as Katryn Bosch. I think that triggered something. Maybe imagining a _hartseer_ singer making her next _snot-en-trane_ song or something of the like. Snot and tears. What heartless little hells who make fun of the suffering of Die Briels call sad songs and movies.
track 3- a judie tzuke ballad Bring the Rain and then the guitar tone of -Racing in A - by Steve Hackett....with further echoes of Please Dont Touch with the Charleston drop. While we're here track two a poppier Colosseum II signposts above are my off the cuff Hopinion track 4: am i in a shopping mall or even a remake of Grange Hill Remade for the Matrix? wow, these guys certainly can play. ... i'll get me coat. nah, i gotta hear the rest... ah! got ya "it's a toaster nah it's a telly!" nah it's a KB badge showing her arms crossed the stories I could tell... last track: LOVELY intro glad i hung around expectin Jon to sing Give Love Each Day any minute.... but no, so I'll have to do it instead ... Give Love that is! Diolch Justin. Fruitful. Great last song . Excellent. Patience is a Virtue. and u got a fretless feast on bass see ya around maybe! The Most High Knows!
`track 1- the sax reminded me of a marvellous early 80s epic by The Waterboys , "Red Army Blues" which has the added ingredients of voice and lyrics. Instrumentally and production-wise it also reminds me of Judie Tzuke's Welcome to the Cruise on steroids, again , and most significantly, without the human vocal.
Great Finnish musician and fun, obscure music in a TH-cam forest of quite boring reaction vids 😊 That's why we support JP! Btw. his surname is pronounced "Poh-yola" (and not in a Spanish manner).
An interesting listen. But I can't say, for the most part, I liked this. The majority of it left me a little flat. The musical ability is exemplary, but tracks 1, 3, 4, & 5, had a melacholy hanging over them I couldn't warm to. As well as they were played, arranged etc, the melodies didn't grab me, and they all seemed a little technical. Re melancholy, shout out to christianmunthe here, for his insight re the Nordic psyche :). Vapour Trails was decent, and the nearest to being 'upbeat', but for me, Try To Remeber was the standout tune. A beautiful, haunting piece this, partic those first 3 mins. Very filmic evoking pictures of sweeping landscapes (to me at least). I mightn't listen to this again, as a whole, but i'll likely return for those 2 track.
Pekka Pohjola is awesome! Never heard of him until now. I will be listening to a whole lot more from Pekka Pohjola. Thank you Justin for playing and reacting to this album. The first cut was amazing.
Thanks for this gift JP.
What I love about Pekka’s compositions is the melodies, those Nordic type ones (I live next door to Finland) arranged in so many styles but still being cohesive. There’s orchestral, folk, prog, fusion, rock.
May I suggest his three first albums:
Pihkasilmä Kaarnakorva
Harakka Bialoipokku
Keesojen Lehto
or why not something from the bands he was part of; Wigwam and Made in Sweden.
Keesojen Lehto album is called Mathematician's Air Display in English, which is the first song from Pekka that JP listened to.
@@lassesaikkonen501 Yeah, but he should do the whole album.
@@linusfotograf I agree. I especially like the collaborations with the Oldfield family.
Kate Bush! Pekka is our national treasure! So glad to see you like his music as well - he's one of my biggest inspirations for sure. All the best from Finland and thanks for the video!
I'm Finnish and I can tell you that Pekka was a genius and a revered figure in our musical landscape. He's by far my favorite of our musician/composers, saw him live a few times. Please check out the Urban Tango album - totally brilliant and very different from Visitation. And it contains a tune called Heavy Jazz - a term you used here to describe Strange Awakening! And the tune called Risto, from his Space Waltz album. On that track, guitarist Seppo Tyni plays a stunning solo that should be in the annals of guitar playing. Pekka was a shy, withdrawn person who sadly passed away in the early 2000's, after decades of battling alcohol addiction - very Finnish, unfortunately 😢
Great choice! You should try also Pohjola's song Imppu's Tango from his album Urban Tango. Pekka's music is very "visual" and storytelling. A lot of influences from Finnish nature and even Sibelius!
Pekka put out a whole series of similarly playful, quirky, technical, and yet accessible albums. Explore some more! (Kate Bush, too.)
Kate Bush! I really enjoyed Pekka Pohjola. Thanks again for always having such a great variety of music.
My pleasure! Thanks Benji!!
"Visitation" is probably Pekka Pohjola's artistic peak, but it's difficult to agree on, because he made so many beautiful and exciting albums. "Try to remember" is certainly my all time favorite track from this composer/musician.
Just bought the original LPs of this and 'Magpie' ($20 each on eBay, a steal), I collect anything prog and came to him from Wigwam. I am blown away at how good both LPs are. Really dig the opener here, too. Definitely hear a 'Peaches En Regalia' Zappa thing.
Pekka is a Nordic progg/jazzrock legend and pioneer, besides a bass virtuoso and leader of his own bands, he also played a lot with Jukka Tolonen (another Finish legend in these genres), and with the last instalment of the band Made in Sweden, featuring Jojje Wadenius and Wlodek Gulgowski, among others. Lots of videos here on YT. As with other Nordic artists in this area, there's a lot of peculiar melodics owing to the Nordic folk music tradiutions, with a distinct melancolic feel. All of the musicians you mention here are stellar Finish players in jazz and rock from this time. One (in)famous story about Pekka is that he turned down a straight offer to join the Zappa band with the open motivation that the music was "too much bullshit".
Another lost opportunity. Pekka Pohjola was also offered a place in Zappa's band. Made In Sweden was asked by ABBA to be their backing band on the oncoming US tour. They or Pohjola and drummer Vesa Aaltonen, declined the music being too pop - oriented.
This is valueble insight to those wondering.
@@onsesejoo2605 His career did contain the occasional pop recording though. Here he is backing Muska together with Wigwam bandmates Ronnie Österberg (drums) and Jukka Gustavson (piano) and a trio of jazz horn players also signed to Love records at the time: th-cam.com/video/71lvqDSbT60/w-d-xo.html
There is one Finnish band you really need to react to, 22-Pistepirkko, very different music from Pekka but one of the best bands to come out of Finland.
Pohjola and Fokus have very similar tune paths sometimes, love both
Wigwam and Tasavallan Presidentti were two other jazzy-prog-type Finnish bands from the 70s. They get a bit tedious from time to time, but they do have their moments of brilliance. For a complete switch in musical motifs, you could try the Hurriganes, from about the same time period. ps - for Finnish pronunciation, there are two rules: the emphasis/stress is always on the first syllable of any word, and all letters in a word are pronounced/enunciated. If you see double vowels or double consonants, both letters are sounded.
He made some really good stuff from that period..... love it
Thanks JP for this reaction! There is not much Pekka Pohjola reaction in TH-cam, and yours was absolutely killer, good analysis. My favorite Pekka album for sure and Strange Awakening probably my favorite song from Pekka. PS. Kate Bush!
Ty so much ig! Very happy to listen to Pekka😃
"Playful" was a good description. Interesting, generally fresh, and held my interest, throughout; in the tradition of great jazz. Definitely not for every occasion, but it works well for certain moods (I can imagine putting this on while I was woodworking, cooking, or listening while sitting in a small club at an early evening show). Kate Bush says "Y'know, I might suggest not attempting dancing to this" (well, just in my imagination).
:D Yes, it's definitely inspiring me to hear more (although I'm messing round with other things at the same time today - but the music makes me pause every now and again, so it's not just "background").
This is good Schist, as the geologists say. Very Gneiss.
The artist is Katryn Bosch, I think. Looks similar, anyway.
The more I hear, the more I become sure that this album or this group must have been a big influence on *Mr Bungle* (or at least their *Carousel* epoch - not quite so much on *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny* ). I think maybe even Tim Smith listened to them. (But maybe the whole circus music sound was popular at the time, and lots of people picked up on it. Could've even been the theme song of some popular TV series making little worm tunnels into musician's inner ears, and then reappearing at album scale later on.
Something made me think of *Die Trein Na Pretoria* (The Train to Pretoria), a song my mother and her siblings have made fun of since they were children. Unfortunately I can't think how on Earth this popped into my head. It's just an old 'sad-country' song with a bit of ox wagon in it. The conductor see a little girl on the train. She doesn't have a ticket. Even if she walks, she has to get to Pretoria, because her mother's there, sick and dying. He feels sorry for her and pays for her ticket. Mom dies, there's a heap of sand, and the conductor's heart breaks again, so he adopts the little girl. End of song.
I think what my Mom and them picked up on about this when they were kids was that people would listen to that song just to _make_ themselves feel sad, and cry - which is a weird thing it's not uncommon for reasonably normal humans to do. The singers put a bit of extra misery in their voices, though. Anyway, naughty kids might find this funny, and long before I ever heard the song itself, I've heard old revived naughty kids sing it in wavering, ancient, sad-granny voices, and never manage to finish because of the laughter.
OK, so that's not helping me remember why I'd remember something like Die Trein Na Pretoria.
(Actually a modern a cappella-ish group made a record of songs by the group responsible for the song at one stage. They called themselves, "Die Grafsteensingers" - meaning, "the grave stone singers" - so even the fans of Die Briels mock them, it would seem. (The band was Die Briels - "the Briel family" basically).
I'm in a few minds about those songs, these days. Yes, they're funny-sad (because they're made purely to give the listener some nice tears to weep), but there's something slightly real-sad about them, too. In a whole-of-humanity kind of way, since the experience of life out of which some things grow is not just part of the past or one little forlorn and frosty, dusty, dry and hopeless corner of some particular corner of this Earth.
In the case of that song, the singers would have probably known people who saw our concentration camps (Lord Kitchener came up with a practical way of dealing with rebels who wouldn't just admit they'd lost and surrender. Unfortunately it killed children and so sowed all sorts of bitterness for the whole of the future following this.) The "Boers" of those times were very poor. (Just like most people here, since it's just that kind of place if you remove the treasure chests from the equation. Not helped by the fact that it was full of wanderers of all kinds. Lots of refugees always.) Properly poor, the way people who've been properly poor would know. No shoes for school, for instance. Shoes are for Sunday, and don't scuff them. Poor and raised on memories of how everything was destroyed (all from one point of view, yes, but when you're properly poor you tend not to see the big picture. You need to at least live in a world where you take it for granted that tomorrow morning there will be breakfast for that kind of vision. It's produced in the stomach, more than in the mind.)
Ja, ja, so it's these very poor, barely educated, terribly sad old frail little grannies, who sometimes seem to actually enjoy being depressed, bumping up against a new world that's leaving them behind. And then The Briels find a way of making a reasonable living by singing to that; and the naughty little hells who would _never_ sneak onto the train so that they can go and say goodbye to _their_ dying mothers in Pretoria, find something funny about this and make fun of it.
Naughty little hells were still going to school barefoot at the time, but that's what everyone does, so it was no big deal.
I suppose I'd better give a link to anyone who survived this far down this failed attempt to track down how Die Trein Na Pretoria popped into my head, while listening to some next-level prog. It's short, so shouldn't hurt too much.
th-cam.com/video/iVZavq1vlNY/w-d-xo.html
ED. I can do translations if required, but I think I'll work on the assumption that they're not needed right now.
ED. 2. Ah! I gave the artist's name as Katryn Bosch. I think that triggered something. Maybe imagining a _hartseer_ singer making her next _snot-en-trane_ song or something of the like.
Snot and tears. What heartless little hells who make fun of the suffering of Die Briels call sad songs and movies.
But is it rock?
track 3- a judie tzuke ballad Bring the Rain and then the guitar tone of -Racing in A - by Steve Hackett....with further echoes of Please Dont Touch with the Charleston drop.
While we're here track two
a poppier Colosseum II
signposts above are my off the cuff Hopinion
track 4:
am i in a shopping mall or even a remake of Grange Hill Remade for the Matrix? wow, these guys certainly can play. ... i'll get me coat. nah, i gotta hear the rest...
ah! got ya
"it's a toaster nah it's a telly!" nah it's a KB badge showing her arms crossed
the stories I could tell...
last track:
LOVELY intro
glad i hung around
expectin Jon to sing Give Love Each Day any minute.... but no, so I'll have to do it instead ... Give Love that is!
Diolch Justin. Fruitful. Great last song . Excellent. Patience is a Virtue. and u got a fretless feast on bass
see ya around maybe! The Most High Knows!
`track 1- the sax reminded me of a marvellous early 80s epic by The Waterboys , "Red Army Blues" which has the added ingredients of voice and lyrics.
Instrumentally and production-wise it also reminds me of Judie Tzuke's Welcome to the Cruise on steroids, again , and most significantly, without the human vocal.
Gotta love Pekka!
Love it! (Katie!)
I'm glad Martin! Ty for listening!
Kate Bush
Great stuff from Pekka!
Have you ever listened to anything by his earlier band, Wigwam?
Frank Zappa wanted Pekka in his band (when Pekka played with "Made in Sweden"), but Pekka turned him down with the motivation: "Too much Bullshit".
Pekka also released the album The Mathematician's Air Display which features Mike and Sally Oldfield.
And it's incredible!
Great Finnish musician and fun, obscure music in a TH-cam forest of quite boring reaction vids 😊 That's why we support JP! Btw. his surname is pronounced "Poh-yola" (and not in a Spanish manner).
Appreciate you Torbjrn :) Ty ty
Pohjola is pronounced POCH-YO-LA (not quite the CH but the H is real) for future reference.
Ty ty :)
Hmm that was pretty damn good, though I'm never a fan of high squeaky saxophone.
Well i never! More Prog!!
Tee-hee :)
Mode changes? prog vibes? it is strange but I like it
Kate Bush, Thank you!
Kate Bush pin?
An interesting listen. But I can't say, for the most part, I liked this. The majority of it left me a little flat. The musical ability is exemplary, but tracks 1, 3, 4, & 5, had a melacholy hanging over them I couldn't warm to. As well as they were played, arranged etc, the melodies didn't grab me, and they all seemed a little technical. Re melancholy, shout out to christianmunthe here, for his insight re the Nordic psyche :). Vapour Trails was decent, and the nearest to being 'upbeat', but for me, Try To Remeber was the standout tune. A beautiful, haunting piece this, partic those first 3 mins. Very filmic evoking pictures of sweeping landscapes (to me at least). I mightn't listen to this again, as a whole, but i'll likely return for those 2 track.