Piggybacking on 1992’s Invisible Storm, ECM maverick Edward Vesala returned with his organic collective, Sound & Fury, as our guide for Nordic Gallery. Vesala draws a thinner circle around his ensemble this time around, weaving inside it a dreamcatcher for communal freedom, as exemplified in the 11-minute “Bird In The High Room,” a menagerie of cymbals, muted horns, drums, and birdsong. The latter signals a luxuriant indulgence in the Vesala soundscape as winds and wings fall in line like a panel out of Where the Wild Things Are. Even the electric guitar whistles in its sibilant cage, avian heart unfolded. Field recordings continue to leave breadcrumb trail of “Fulflandia” on its way toward “The Quay of Meditative Future.” Harpist Iro Haarla’s veiled and omnipresent insistence turns arrival into departure as the music’s long-shadowed caravan cuts a line in the sand.

If jazz was ever meant to be a religion, its prayers might sound something like Nan Madol. The title means “spaces between,” and no description of this music could be more apt. The album is an eclectic mandala of drones, eruptions of ecstatic liberation, and snatches of melody from both near and far. Influences range from Japanese folk melodies to Alpine herding calls, and all of them strung by a powerful understatement of continuity.

This album marked Vesala's return to ECM a decade after his last release for the label, Satu. Only one musician remained from his last appearance, Pentti Lahti. However, the aesthetic remains the same: a sensuous kind of free jazz with an air of ritual, and one tune from long ago reappears in a new guise ("The Wind" off the Nan Madol album). Most of the tracks here have something very distinctive about them, even if the instrumental lines wildly proliferate in the free jazz fashion. "Frozen Melody" opens with a beautiful introduction from Lahti that sounds like mid-period Coltrane. "Calypso Bulbosa" suddenly turns things electric and slightly funky with its electronic drums.

Edward Vesala is one of those rare treasures whose every recorded move seems to ooze with profundity. Flanked by an all-star cast of mostly Scandinavian talent, he and his collective visions have produced some of the most inestimable highpoints of the ECM discography. On Satu, it’s as if he has stumbled into an old radio program, the signal of which has only now reached us. As in a community of mystics squinting into the morning sun, it brightens with the golden light of selfless realization. The thrumming bass of Palle Danielsson vibrates like an inner voice in the title cut, an earthen call to wordless action.

If jazz is a body, then Edward Vesala is its ligament of fascination. Flexing and creaking with the passage of emotion into life and life into silence, the drummer’s disarming soundscapes never fail to intrigue, to say something potent and new. In spite of its tongue-in-cheek title, Ode To The Death Of Jazz is, strangely, one of his more uplifting exercises in sonic production.
The title of “Sylvan Swizzle” sets the bar in both tone and sentiment, opening in a smooth and winding road of flute, woodwinds, percussion, and harp. Textural possibilities bear the fruit of the ensemble’s explorations in somatic sound: an exercise in pathos, to be sure, if only through the eyes of something not human. The space here is dark yet flecked with iridescence, sporting yet bogged down by infirmity, vivacious yet weak in the eyes…