MARIA DUARTE reviews Desperate Journey, Blue Moon, Pillion, and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
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A marvel of musical transmigration
[Ville .fi/Creative Commons]
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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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