Nubya Garcia, Theo Croker and many more take the stage at Tampere Jazz Happening

After almost every piece, she asks the audience how they feel. Nubya Garcia seems to enjoy chatting this evening. She also discusses which piece should be played next with her musicians on stage for all to hear. You can call this spontaneous and authentic, but you can also think it's terrible. Musically, at any rate, the so popular Brit with Caribbean roots and her quartet at the Tampere Jazz Happening deliver their usual casual to biting mixture of sometimes spiritual saxophone lines, paired with dubstep, reggae or broken beats. Some of the music is gripping, some of it is a bit long, a minute-long solo by their double bass player is even a bit boring. In the end, however, the audience wants and gets an encore and everyone seems satisfied.

US trumpeter Theo Croker also comes along casually with his mixture of hip hop, a little electronic and jazz, which could come from the Sixties, even if the bass grooves and drum breakbeats sound hip and very contemporary. "Jazz Is Dead" Croker sings at the beginning of the concert - and then shows that this is not true, of course. Also by seeking ways to combine tradition and modern trends. On this evening, however, his music mix is not at all as provocative as his sung statement, but rather good, grooving entertainment, presented by very good musicians.

There are other discoveries in Tampere. For example, the Danish alto saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, who lives in Trondheim, Norway, with her Trio North. Together with the Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and US drummer Chris Corsano, the saxophonist, who also comes across as very likeable on stage, succeeds in playing complex music with always the right balance of sound search, total freedom and structure. Narrative sounds and expressive outbursts characterise the saxophone playing of the energetic young Dane, who is only too happy to be driven by the rhythmic fire of her two colleagues. The French ensemble GRIO (Grand Impérial Orchestra) spreads a lot of fresh big band wind. Seven Frenchmen and the Finnish pianist Aki Rissanen enthuse the audience on the last day of the festival with their playfulness and always surprisingly orchestrated music, staged by a very strong, five-member brass section with an undogmatic drive. The ensemble plays with the jazz tradition and yet takes off into its own sound cosmos. Big, powerful aural cinema. Saxophonist Isaiah Collier and his band The Chosen Few also sound powerful, wild and free. In Tampere, the saxophonist from Chicago, who is only in his mid-twenties, presents himself as the reincarnation of John Coltrane, so spiritually and intensely do he and his three boys perform. The quartet leaves no time to catch their breath, the whole set is a tour de force with thundering drums that brings jazz history into the here and now with a lot of forward momentum. The fact that directly after the set, drummer Hamid Drake and his dazzling Alice Coltrane project Turiya pay homage to the great name Coltrane once again - the artistic director and producer of the festival, Juhamatti Kauppinen, demonstrates a great deal of sensitivity for exciting programming.  

On the opening evening and at the end of the festival there is music with free admission. Also to attract a new, young audience to jazz. The calculation works, a long queue forms at the entrance to the festival kick-off. And the curious music lover is immediately challenged by the first of three young bands from Finland and Norway. For the Finnish-Norwegian Ville Lähteenmäki Trio around the hot-running Finnish bass clarinettist Ville Lähteenmäki plays urgently, free-spiritedly, wildly, furiously. You can hear the influence of spiritually oriented jazz greats, often saxophonists, from decades long past, but here, someone goes on his own trip on his instrument. And with the Norwegian trio I Like To Sleep and their power jazz/prog rock, played on vibraphone, baritone guitar and crashing drums, the festival comes to a stormy end. 

What makes the Tampere Jazz Happening very pleasant is that all three venues are close to each other, two of them, the big hall Pakkahuone and the small one, "Klubi", even in the same building, an old customs house. And the Telakka restaurant and theatre is only a minute's walk away. Finnish bands of all kinds will perform there on two of the four festival evenings. For example, the singer and composer Selma Savolainen from Helsinki who, with her sextet with the meaningful name Horror Vacui, shows no fear of emptiness at all, but brings a fresh facet to modern jazz with her idiosyncratic, lyrically perhaps not always convincing indie jazz songs. With the Joona Toivanen Trio, you have to be patient as a listener, because the pianist and his two companions take their time building up their introspective sound images. But in return, you get to hear an acoustic piano trio that is looking for new ways to create its very own band sound.