Review: Emma Salokoski & Ilmiliekki Quartet
Emma on mom’s street
Emma Salokoski has made several linguistic excursions – but this time she lands in Swedish for the first time. On the new album with the band Ilmiliekki, she interprets everything from Edith Södergran to Nils Ferlin.
We meet at a café in Munkkiniemi, just after Emma Salokoski has taken her son to kindergarten.
To the general public, she is known as a jazz singer in the bands Quintessence and Emma Salokoski Ensemble. With the band Ilmiliekki Quartet, she does something different from the rest of the repertoire: an album of folk jazz in Swedish.
It will also be Salokoski’s debut in his native language. For the album, she has gone through a lot of Swedish songs and Swedish folk music, but above all she has searched in her own memory.
“Many of these songs are the kind you heard when you were a kid, even though it’s not a children’s record. There’s something special about songs that your mother and grandmother sang to you when you were little, the atmosphere becomes a little extra magical. I don’t have the same relationship with Finnish folk or children’s songs, although I may have learned to appreciate them later. I think my son has a rather different relationship with Finnish songs, because my husband (Ilmiliekki drummer Olavi Louhivuori) often sings them to him at appropriate times.
The old cliché that Swedish song tradition is cheerful and cheerful while Finnish folk music is based on Slavic melancholy is put to shame when you listen to Vi sälje våra hemman.
“There are many tragic elements in the Swedish music tradition. Think of the killer ballads… and on the title track of the album.
We sold our homesteads, a traditional waltz with lyrics by Jan Johansson, sucks with the listener from the front row. It is a brutal emigrant song about disillusioned Americans.
Here you leave your homeland in the hope of a better life, but end up on cramped ships where “you see the dead being thrown into the wild river of the sea”.
Do you feel strongly about the emigrant stories? The song has given its name to the entire album.
– I live very much into this story when I sing, but at the same time the title has a symbolic meaning. We have all sold our homesteads, in a way, I mean that American culture is now part of our culture. But at the same time, this Nordic heritage is in the background and insisting,” she says.
Salokoski says that she can listen to old records with Quintessence and feel that English has become a foreign language.
“When I started, I never thought I would sing in Finnish. But now when I listen to those English recordings, it feels like I’m playing a role. You always do, because you always tell different stories, but this English Emma Salokoski feels a bit … childish,” she says.
But she does not intend to become a full-fledged folk musician now, just because she made her first album in Swedish.
“Jazz is an American invention, so the American is always there.
On the new album, there are also things that pull in the classic direction. Here is an interpretation of Tegengren/Sibelius’s Den höga hilmen, and then there is Salokoski’s own composition, a setting of Edith Södergran’s A Captured Bird. Not even the one with particularly cheerful symbolism. Salokoski wrote the song as a 19-year-old.
“Södergran has a very strong atmosphere in most of his poems. This golden cage may also describe a kind of convention shackles. And that spoke well to me – when you’re nineteen, you want to be a bit of a rebel,” she says.