Review: Jussi Reijonen’s ‘Three Seconds | Kolme Toista’

“From the snowy, windswept peaks of Lapland to the desert of the Empty Quarter, Three Seconds | Kolme Toista is an adventure unlike any other!” Okay, that’s not Jussi Reijonen’s stated program behind Three Seconds | Kolme Toista (Challenge Records, 2022), which is at once more ambitious and more personal. Yet the music conceived by the Boston-based guitarist and oud player is painted on an epic scale.

Reijonen was born in a town just south of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. Before coming to the U.S., he grew up in Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, and Lebanon. The three “seconds,” a literal translation from the Finnish idiom meaning “others,” represent Reijonen’s conditional sense of cultural identity, the difficulties that caused for him and his family, and finally, the reconciliation of the two threads that emerged.

It’s a hero’s journey, more Hulk than Hegel, that’s announced in “The Veil” by a bardic strummed guitar chord. Naseem Alatrash introduces a lonely theme that becomes a Viking horn call when taken up by the far-away brass choir of Jason Palmer’s trumpet and Bulut Gülen’s muscular trombone. Pounding downbeats shift the location to the southeast for Alatrash and violinist Laith Sidiq’s twining, microtonal strings. 

Alatrash’s mournful taqsim ushers in “Transient,” a quiet nocturne under the immensity of the desert sky that becomes a kind of percussion concerto for Vancil Cooper and Keita Ogawa. A slow movement at the center of the album’s arch structure, “The Weaver, Every So Often Shifting The Sands Beneath Her,” shifts the action to an interior scene for twining horn solos over a balmy head-nod tempo. 

The guitar riff from “The Veil,” now becalmed under a slinky frame-drum beat, is shattered by the full band slamming into a roaring collective improv in 7 powered by Kyle Miles’ deep bass and thudding drums from Cooper. The 10-minute-long “Median,” which begins with the Viking horn call, closes the journey with Palmer’s nostalgic trumpet, a consolatory—or maybe it’s elegiac—denouement. 

This is a classic three-act screenplay structure, and there’s real drama in the way the musical episodes are paced and sequenced. It’s filmic in the best sense of the word. Roll credits and fade to black.

Three Seconds | Kolme Toista  is now available on Challenge Records. It can be purchased in our Amazon affiliate store.

Tracklist: 1. The Veil; 2. Transient; 3. The Weaver, Every So Often Shifting The Sands Beneath Her; 4. Verso; 5. Median.  

Personnel: Jussi Reijonen (fretless and fretted electric guitars, classical guitar, oud), Jason Palmer (trumpet, flugelhorn), Bulut Gülen (trombone), Layth Sidiq (violin), Naseem Alatrash (cello), Utar Artun (piano), Kyle Miles (acoustic and fretless basses), Vancil Cooper (drums), Keita Ogawa (percussion).   

Photo credit: Luis Zavaleta