| World Jazz |
Jussi Reijonen’s Kaiho: Music of Memory, Silence, and Shared Inheritance.
We had already taken note of the first chapter of this live project, Sayr: Salt – First. With Kaiho, released in early January, Jussi Reijonen offers what feels less like a sequel than a deepening, more intimate, more inward-looking, and more daring in its poetic and narrative ambition. If Sayr established the terrain, Kaiho settles into it, listening closely to what the ground itself has to say.
A guitarist and oud specialist, Reijonen leads the listener this time into a sound world strongly marked by Celtic resonances. The album evokes memories of concerts heard long ago in Scotland, where instrumentalists pursued similarly expansive ideas, though often in a rawer, more overtly folk-driven idiom. Reijonen’s approach is different: more refined, more architectural, yet no less rooted in oral tradition.
Celtic culture, after all, is not a style so much as a continuum. Historically, its musicians and troubadours were storytellers, observers of their time, carriers of collective memory. It is within this lineage that Reijonen’s work finds its place. Yet the Celtic thread is not alone. Beneath the surface, attentive listeners will detect Andalusian inflections: modal turns, rhythmic suspensions, a certain way of letting melody breathe. This is not music that announces its influences; it asks the listener to lean in, to be carried gently toward reverie, dreams, and perhaps the half-forgotten myths of seafaring peoples.
To understand how such disparate elements coexist so naturally, one must return to the beginning of Reijonen’s story: “Born in Rovaniemi, a small town on the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, having grown up in Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, and Lebanon, and having spent much of his adult life in the United States, Jussi Reijonen has lived a life steeped in the sounds, images, scents, and nuances of Nordic, Arab, East African, and North American aesthetics and expressions, all of which are reflected in his creative work as a composer, improviser, and performer.”
In many ways, everything is already there. Kaiho is travel music, but not in the superficial sense of exoticism. It is the work of a deeply attentive traveler, someone who listens before speaking. Reijonen’s music is built on detail: every note carries weight, and so do the silences that surround it. In this regard, his sensibility recalls composers such as Monteverdi or Purcell, masters who understood that silence is not the absence of sound but a means of intensifying what follows.
Here, music becomes an exercise in awareness and intention. Nothing feels accidental. Reijonen, both composer and improviser, seems equally attuned to the pulse of the world and to the inner lives of those who inhabit it. His pieces invite the same kind of attention one brings to works in a museum: they ask to be encountered on their own terms, as expressions of shared human value that exceed cultural borders.
This is art as much as it is music. Kaiho unfolds as a contemplative, almost Zen-like experience, music that bears the marks of a disenchanted world while remaining quietly infused with hope. It feels grounded in the soil and suspended in the air at the same time, elusive by design. One is left wondering whether these pieces could ever be reproduced outside this recording, so closely do they seem tied to the moment of their emergence.
Their intimacy suggests a long intellectual and emotional gestation, a slow distillation rather than a spontaneous outpouring. In an era increasingly dominated by speed, saturation, and digital excess, Reijonen offers something else entirely: music that resists consumption and instead invites reflection.
There are many forms of music worthy of admiration. This is among those that shape us over time, the way meaningful books do, not by overwhelming us, but by quietly accompanying our thinking, long after the final note has faded.
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, December 24th 2025
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Musician: Jussi Reijonen
Track Listing:
1. halla 28:35
2. fes 10:47
3. vielä 02:52
4. halla: pihka [excerpt] 04:06
5. halla: suisto [excerpt] 06:56
loci and imagines by Jussi Reijonen
Steel-string acoustic guitar and Arabic ‘ud by Jussi Reijonen
Recorded live in concert at Black Box Hall, Musiikkitalo, Helsinki, Finland, September 19th, 2025 by Olli Ovaskainen
Concert produced by Anna Huuskonen-Kuhlefelt
Concert lighting by Sirje Ruohtula
Visual concept, photography and videography by Ville Tanttu
Artwork concept, layout and design by Jussi Reijonen
Mixed and mastered at Bacqué Recording, Roselle NJ, United States by Luis Bacqué
Recording produced by Jussi Reijonen