Here/There is finally here!
This album is a very personal one. Not only because it’s the first studio album with good friends playing on it, but also because some of these tunes I have worked on for a long time and a lot of things have happened in the past ten years. They have evolved with me and I’ve honed them a lot to make them better. The project started in 2012 when I composed the first track for a friend (originally called “Here, There & Everywhere”). We played it with some friends and it was a lot of a fun immediately.
The next tune that came to be was Smile, which was inspired by a smile of a stranger on the streets of Aarhus, Denmark in 2013. Afterwards I went to a piano and the tune basically composed itself in five minutes. Sometimes you get lucky like that!
From 2013 to 2017 I didn’t compose that much - mostly played other people’s music such as Mikko Sarvanne Hip Company, practiced classical music like Ravel and Debussy and transcribed solos by Bud Powell, Kris Bowers (now a fantastic film music composer) and of course Brad Mehldau.
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Rest of the tunes on the album were composed between ‘17-’21, Endless Joy being the newest one. At the time I was practicing J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variation in G major and wanted to create one happy tune for the album. The opening three-note melody which the whole tune is based on comes from that Bach variation. EJ is an ode to the joy of creating music. More stories you can find on the CD album (and vinyl LP when we have put the budget together…;))
About the recording session - we headed to the studio on a cold Finnish December morning, set up and started tracking. We recorded everything over 2 days. Most tunes are the 1st or 2nd takes from the 2nd studio day. Not necessary the ‘cleanest’ of all, but it had that fresh energy… Maybe because we went to an almost cold sauna on the 1st evening, the electric stove didn’t work right…
Here are some pics from the sesh! Hope you enjoy the music - you can stream it here: https://teemukekkonen.bandcamp.com/, YouTube and from Oct 6 on Spotify, Tidal and so on…
Peace! ✌️