RITA DI SANTO points out the social experience of exploitation and oppression that inform the popular winners at this year’s festival
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A marvel of musical transmigration
[Ville .fi/Creative Commons]
PETER MASON is tickled by a new book and exhibition that mine the rotten anachronism of the monarchy for laughs
A Nazi zeppelin whodunnit, death amidst detoxification, a twistaholic’s delight, and noir fiction for criminals
STEVE JOHNSON salutes the mellifluous tones and clear-minded political message of a uniquely relevant Birmingham-born singer-songwriter
STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
Iro Haarla
Northbound
(ECM)
IRO HAARLA was born in 1956 in Tampere, Finland, 70 miles north of Helsinki. After school she studied classical piano and composition at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, where she also discovered an empathy with great jazz pianists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and the Canadian Paul Bley.
She identified strongly with Bley’s “silence and dissonance.”
Haarla met the Finnish jazz drummer, later her husband, Edward Vesala, in 1978 and put aside her classical ambitions, joining his ensemble Sound and Fury as arranger and self-taught harpist, bringing a new architecture to his music.
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