Aurora Hentunen: Little Further (digital outlets)

Now this is interesting: Aurora Hentunen is a Finnish pianist/composer/vocalist who steers her own quintet and is among the brighter lights of European jazz.

As far as we can tell she is now based in Amsterdam and tours regularly.

Of Little Further, she tells us in an email, “the album's music reflects the state of being during the last few years, forced collective stagnation and uncertainty of the future”.

Which means that is some distance from the plethora of introverted post-lockdown albums which came out in recent years.

After the thoughtful, slightly portentous opener One Room, this swirls off into the vigorous, muscular Pressured Speech with claustrophobic effects and electronic keyboards and driving drumming. Think an especially irritated Weather Report sick of being in isolation.

Hentunen carries an excellent band: trumpeter Joona Kilponen, tenor player Ukko Heinonen (who also contributes “effects”), electric and acoustic bassist Veli-Matti Silanterä and drummer Ville Luukkonen.

Less Than Always opens like a late night ballad with Heinonen to the fore but becomes more a sweeping sound palette with synth effects.

Synth bassist and keyboard player Branislav Vlaisavljević appears on the opener and the brief but moodily sci-fi atmospherics of The Last Ones which really does evoke the image of survivors on a dying planet.

There's a sense of foreboding in some of these nine pieces (the title track) but the mood is also leavened by lightness and optimism (Only For Now, But I'm Here) and 2023 Grammy-winning guest bassist Linda May Han Oh – Malaysian-born Australian, an associate professor at Berklee – plays on the Gray Waves duet.

Letter at the end is a spoken word farewell letter from the last survivor of a global pandemic. Heavy stuff.

Little Further offers a lot of what Wynton Marsalis would call “information”, both musical and by way of the letter.

Aurora Hentunen and her group subvert expectations right down to that final farewell.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here