Jasper Alblas

A melody you never heard before takes you back to a place where you have never been. Immediately, from the first notes of Traveller’s Ways, you as the listener feel that wondrous combination of familiarity and astonishment. On this magnificent album, Somsen, Pieranunzi and Mirabassi create music that feels like coming home and at the same time leads to numerous unknown destinations you have never visited before.

These days, Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958) is one of the best-known early 20th century modernists in Finnish classical music. In his early years, he composed in the National Romantic style, but by the time he was 23, he had developed a much more progressive style. By the beginning of the 1920s, he was writing in a modern, free-tonal musical language with a strong focus on timbral colour. Merikanto himself considered his “radical” style to be innate, but we know he was in fact inspired by Debussy and Scriabin, and especially Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony. After moving from the countryside back to Helsinki in 1928, Merikanto started actively networking with other Finnish composers, which also had an effect on his music.

"An artist has various musical recipes in the making. There is no artist with only one interest or one musical expression. A particular style, yes. But that style first has to be formed by various experiments. Whether Pili Pili is the experiment of a jazz musician or whether Pili Pili also plays jazz … the answer is written in the stars! The most important thing for me is that I feel comfortable with Pili Pili's concept and its musicians like a fish in the water: In this band, which has undergone many transformations in the course of its 20-year lifetime, I have never felt creatively checked or curbed." Jasper van't Hof