DEEDS AND TALKS

Thanks Hugues for advicing! This is a very good, accessible jazz-rock album. I hope it's available. The composer-guitarist Ilpo Murtojärvi is a name that still pops up in Finnish pop/rock albums as he's an active session guitarist, but otherwise the band or its members - very young at the time; see keyboard player Kyösti Laiho's greeting - are not well-known. The music is quite balanced, almost a bit mild if you expect a sharp progressive edge. There are no big surprises. But that's not any fault, in fact I could call this album a faultless work. Maybe the closest band in style is Traffic. One could also say it's a distant, not-that- daring and reedless relative of Happy The Man. Clean jazzy playing also brought Wigwam to my mind here and there, and Johnny Gustafsson's voice could easily replace Jim Pembroke's. The only instrumental track is 'Barokki' (it has some Baroque influences, without sounding pretentious cross-over) but the whole album is highly musical and enjoyable if you like (especially Finnish 70's) jazz-rock. Perhaps a deeper emotion in music would have made it even better. (The band info talks about many styles from blues to symphonic... Well, maybe I hear them in later listenings. I was a bit hasty with this review.)