Agatha -teaser
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SOUNDTRACK OF IMAGINATION
Conceptuality and visions
Kerkko Koskinen’s musical visions have always been ambitious. When he put together what was to become the most popular rock/pop band in Finland in the 1990s, Ultra Bra, the instrumentation of a standard band was just not enough. In addition to four vocalists, the 13-member band included a horn section, two percussionists, and a large-scale string assembly, used in the band’s recordings. Striving to create a “big†sound has always been present in Koskinen’s production, and finally, with Agatha, he has found the orchestra to match his musical vision: a world-class big band, Umo Jazz Orchestra, and a world-class soloist, trumpetist Verneri Pohjola.
Koskinen and Pohjola’s musician personas complement each other in a way that inevitably brings to mind one of the most legendary composer-soloist partnerships in the history of jazz: that of Gil Evans and Miles Davis. Just like Davis created a humane, accessible instrumental contact surface to Evans’ architectural arrangements, Koskinen’s rich and full orchestration is balanced by Pohjola’s trumpetism, full of contrast and intimacy. To mention just a few, Pale Horse, And Then There Was One, and Cats And Pigeons are brilliant examples of Koskinen and Pohjola’s fruitful cooperation.
Jazz
Jazz has always played an important part in the wide spectrum of Koskinen’s musical influences, but it was forced to the background in the sound scenery of modern rock, when he was involved in making more commercial popular music. However, both Koskinen’s solo productions and the music composed for Ultra Bra illustrate his tendency to favor the composition, arrangement and interpretation styles of jazz music. Agatha was Koskinen’s opportunity to work in a pure jazz subtext, and the result is a full-blooded, clean-cut, and idiomatic big band record. Koskinen’s years spent in the world of pop and rock do not really show on Agatha; on the contrary, his stylistic role models appear to be the likes of Gil Evans, Lalo Schiffrin and Henry Mancini, whose musical esthetics are best reflected in Sparkling Arsenic and Passenger to Copenhagen. To sum up, Agatha is the creation of a composer who knows the big band tradition inside out. It may therefore come as a surprise that the most important influences in Koskinen’s music are actually not from the world of jazz, but stem from classical music.
Classical music
The music on Agatha exudes the heritage of 20th century romantic-impressionist orchestral music. Though Koskinen’s style includes aspects of Finnish nationalistic and European romantic expression, the role models of his orchestral thinking can be found further east, in early 20th century Russia. At its most romantic, Koskinen reflects the pathos of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, as the opening track Crooked Room illustrates, with its extravagantly composed and performed piano section (played by the composer himself). The two composers that have clearly had the most effect on Agatha’s music are closer to our own time. The first is Dmitri Shostakovich, whose symphonies are clearly present in the static, hypnotic and rhythmic repetitiveness of Elephants Can Remember and The Pointing Finger. An even more important influence for Koskinen’s Agatha has been Igor Stravinsky, and his Russian period, during which Stravinsky composed music for the ballets Petrushka, The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Reflections of The Rite of Spring pop up constantly while listening to Agatha - most obviously in Cats And Pigeons, which contains clear references to the thematic material of The Rite of Spring. UMO Jazz Orchestra’s woodwind section is awarded plenty of space from the soloist, and the modal, archaic oboe and English horn solos tie Agatha more tightly into the world of Stravinskian expression.
Koskinen’s way of treating melodic material and creating larger forms is reminiscent of the musical esthetics of The Rite of Spring. When classic-romantic orchestral music traditions were built on firm organic development, the molding of material and creating large-scale transitions, Stravinsky discarded the principles of thematic development in The Rite of Spring, and instead bombarded the listener with a flood of constantly renewing melodic-harmonious material. Koskinen operates the same way on Agatha: instead of adopting slowly developing transitions and thematic material thinking, he favors brutal cuts, firm structural transitions and furthers his musical narrative by bringing up new, strongly contrastive elements. These adaptations of Stravinskian musical esthetics, combined with a masterfully arranged expression that honors the big band tradition, makes Agatha a whole that is strong, personal, and very characteristic of its creator.
Agatha
Narration and communication are the cornerstones of Koskinen’s music, and he has often found the basis for his composition in poetry and other non-musical sources. For example, Koskinen has composed music to the texts of Nazim Hikmet, Anna Akhmatova and Frederico Garcia Lorca. In these works, the most important musical parameters are strong melodicity, and logical and harmonious progression. Agatha includes some elements of Koskinen’s text-based vocal music in Helsinki-Vantaa and Riemukaaret (performed by the composer). In Helsinki-Vantaa, originally composed for Ultra Bra, Verneri Pohjola’s lyrical and singing trumpetism illustrates Koskinen’s text-based weaving of melody at its most characteristic: short, almost fragment-like melodic sprouts form a cohesive curve that grows in intensity, and leans strongly on the foundation of processing harmony.
The compositional starting points for the other works on Agatha are more abstract by nature, but Koskinen’s aim to find inspiration for composition from the outside world is still clearly present. The record was inspired by Agatha Christie’s fiction, which has been a long-term object of interest and passion for Koskinen. In spite of this, Agatha should not be treated as an illustration of individual books. The compositional choices and solutions do not aim to describe the plot advancement of Christie’s works; the relationship between the music and the writing is purely allusive. However, Koskinen’s music does create strong visual associations; listening to Agatha is like watching a movie that has yet to be made.
An enlarged big band with French horns and a woodwind section is hard to come by these days. Agatha is an important contribution to the increasingly rare genre of composer-based, orchestral big band music. The record is an intriguing exploration of Koskinen’s composer persona, and if Agatha’s powerful musical expression is at all in debt to the works of its namesake, this brilliant writer has just added to her merits.
