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Jussi Reijonen’s sayr: salt | thirst — A Global Journey Through Sound and Memory
There are albums that present themselves as finished products, polished statements of genre or style. And then there are works that feel like encounters, fleeting, unrepeatable, almost mystical in their intensity. Finnish oud player and composer Jussi Reijonen’s latest release, sayr: salt | thirst, falls squarely in the latter category.
The album, recorded in a single improvised session on a steel-string acoustic guitar in March 2025, resists easy categorization. It is not jazz, though improvisation lies at its core. It is not classical, though it has the arc of a suite. Nor is it folk, though it draws unmistakably on traditions as old as the oud and the kora. Instead, it is something else: a deeply personal meditation that uses sound as a vehicle for memory, reflection, and transcendence.
From large ensemble to solitary voice
This stripped-down project comes after the ambitious Three Seconds | Kolme Toista (2022), a large-ensemble suite in five movements that critics praised as “a work like no other; not merely alternating styles, but inventing a form beyond genre.” Where that earlier album reached outward, embracing orchestral textures and collective voices, sayr: salt | thirst turns inward. The contrast is deliberate: a solitary musician confronting the possibilities of one instrument, one afternoon, one unbroken improvisation.
The album is organized like the two sides of an LP: salt on one, thirst on the other. Each track contains sub-sections, akin to chapters in a longer narrative. And though Reijonen plays only a steel-string guitar, the sound-world he summons seems to expand well beyond it, evoking the resonance of the Finnish kantele, the Moroccan sintir, the West African kora, and of course the oud, the instrument that has shaped so much of his artistic identity.
Echoes and influences
To listen to this record is to hear an entire atlas of musical voices. At moments, there are delicate traces of Hamza El Din’s meditative oud playing; elsewhere, the blues inflections of Lightnin’ Hopkins seem to filter through the strings. One passage recalls the desert pulse of Ali Farka Touré, another the intricate cascades of Toumani Diabaté. There are fleeting gestures that bring to mind Paco de Lucía’s fiery precision, or the vocal ornaments of Umm Kulthum and Fairuz, reimagined through instrumental timbre. This is not quotation or pastiche—it is absorption. Reijonen’s gift is to let these echoes coexist, not as borrowed idioms but as organic elements of his own language.
A demanding listen
This is not, however, an easy album. Its contemplative, almost ascetic quality makes it better suited to attentive listening than casual consumption. In fact, it often feels less like a studio product than a live encounter: the kind of performance best experienced in real time, where the silences matter as much as the notes. The fact that the recording was completed in one take, without overdubs, without edits, underscores its ephemeral nature. What the listener hears is not a “composition” in the conventional sense but an act of discovery, one that unfolds moment by moment.
The man behind the music
Part of what gives the record its distinctive voice is Reijonen’s own biography. Born in Finland but raised across Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, and Lebanon, and later based in the United States, he embodies a transnational perspective that seeps into every note. His playing carries traces of Nordic austerity, Arab ornamentation, African rhythmic vitality, and American openness. This cosmopolitan background does not result in eclecticism for its own sake. Rather, it informs a musical approach that feels deeply rooted, yet borderless.
A journey called sayr
The Arabic word sayr means a path, a progression, a journey. And indeed, sayr: salt | thirst feels like a journey, both geographic and emotional. It moves through moods of melancholy, tension, comfort, and release. It invokes images of bare feet pressing into the soil, of branches and roots, of landscapes that are at once remembered and reimagined. The improvisation becomes what one might call an “acoustic mnemonic palace”: a place where memory is both stored and reshaped through sound.
Final impressions
Not every listener will find a home in this music. Its refusal of categories, its resistance to polish, its reliance on a kind of radical simplicity, all these qualities may frustrate those seeking hooks, choruses, or stylistic clarity. But for those willing to sit with it, to follow its quiet logic, the reward is considerable.
sayr: salt | thirst is less an album than a statement of artistic identity: uncompromising, borderless, and profoundly human. It is a reminder that some of the most enduring music is not made by committee or calculation, but by a single musician listening deeply, to memory, to silence, and to the resonances of a world he has lived.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 1st 2025
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Musician: Jussi Reijonen
Track Listing:
1. salt 16:59
2. thirst 23:01
3. salt: sarvi 05:57
4. thirst: koto 06:18
Performed by Jussi Reijonen
Recorded March 1st 2025 at Unsound, Helsinki, Finland by Jussi Reijonen
Mixed and mastered at Bacqué Recording by Luis Bacqué
Produced by Jussi Reijonen
Photography by Ville Tanttu