Nordic Jazz 08: Iro Haarla

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The two-day Nordic Jazz 08 festival — held on the House of Sweden's roof, overlooking the Potomac — kicks off on Thursday, and all this week readexpress.com will feature interviews with the artists performing there. We've profiled Thursday's performers: composer Kristian Blak from Denmark's Faroe Islands and Sweden's Wildbirds & Peacedrums. Featured today is Finland's Iro Haarla, who will lead a quintet on Friday.

The great experimental Finnish drummer Edward Vesala has a secret weapon: His wife, Iro Haarla, helped orchestrate much of his music, including his last four albums for ECM with the Sound & Fury band.

Haarla has slowly but surely been stepping out as a solo artist since her husband's death in 1999. A pianist and harpist, her music feels almost entirely Nordic in nature. Her 2006 ECM album, "Northbound," is the sound of glaciers melting: slowly unfolding and gorgeously meditative. The CD is filled with desolate lullabies that have a fractured fairytale quality about them.

» EXPRESS: Express 5 things that help define your interpretation of the phrase "Nordic jazz."
» HAARLA: Light, darkness, warmth, coldness, a certain desolateness, calmness, stormy emotions — strong contrasts between light and shades. All these contrasts take form in the Finnish nature and in the character of the Finns. These feelings are very often hidden in the inmost corners of their hearts. The music expresses these feelings and sounds in the North.

» EXPRESS: Sometimes Nordic jazz musicians bristle about being lumped together. But with "Northbound," the CD title states your intentions and many of the song titles play into the idea of Nordic jazz: "On a Crest of a Wave," "Waterworn Rocks," "Veil of Mist," "Light in the Sadness," "A Singing Water Nymph." Is the phrase "Nordic musician" something you embrace?
» HAARLA: The thought, to be a "Nordic musician " is not my intentional goal, but I'm very happy that I was born in this beautiful country. The atmosphere in the Nord makes a very strong impact on my music — especially the extraordinary beauty of the nature and the variations of seasons.

» EXPRESS: When you took up the harp, did it change your approach to the piano in any way?
» HAARLA: I started to learn how to play a harp at the age of 20 by myself. I'm completely self-educated as a harpist — unlike as a pianist and a composer, which I studied very long time at Sibelius-Akademie High School in Helsinki.

Edward Vesala gave me the idea to play a harp, because he needed a harpist who could also improvise. I'm very thankful to him for that.

[When] playing a harp, I operate mostly with scales — some kind of long-line thinking. That is how I play a piano, compose or make orchestrations. If it is a change in comparison with the style before I played harp? That I cannot say.

» EXPRESS: Did you play on your own as a band leader very much before your husband died?
» HAARLA: No, I didn't play my own music at all before my husband's death. Edward Vesala was such a powerful and great musician that I used all my skills and knowledge to help him with his works. I was devoted completely to his music. The time with him was very instructive — in a way a second "high school " in my musical life.

» EXPRESS: How much music do you perform from the Sound & Fury band?
» HAARLA: I don't play the music we played with Sound & Fury any more. Now, at long last, I have an opportunity to compose and perform my own music, which I interrupted for 20 years. That why I wish to play and compose the rest of my life with my own way. Besides, the Sound & Fury band died with Edward Vesala.

» House of Sweden, 2900 K. St. NW; Fri., 7:30 p.m., $25 (or $40 for both nights); 202-467-2600. (Foggy Bottom)

» Listen to samples of Iro Haarla's "Northbound."

Up next: Ola Kvernberg (Thursday).
Photos by Maarit Kytoharju