Where we belong. Odysseus Festival 2024

An Odyssey in Helsinki: jazz meets electronic music, tradition meets experimentation and sounds from all over the world freely intertwine. No headliners, no divisions – just pure sound exploration.

This concert is a pure juggling of sounds. Otis’s spasmodically winning phrases on saxophone catch the eye from the first second. Together with Petter Eldh, they flip through melodies, words, and motifs in an ecstatic, explosive dialogue. Dense grooves, saxophone riffs, Dan Nichols’ colorful keyboards, and Tilo Weber’s fractured rhythmics on drums take this jazz to a whole new level. Rushing, restless, giddy.

“It’s good to be home,” says Otis, a Swede living permanently in Berlin. It’s good to be where we belong,” he adds. Does he mean Scandinavia or Helsinki? I don’t know, but it means that with his friends and a community, we are together thanks to music and the festival.

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Another memorable moment is Islaja’s concert. It all starts with details – a flute’s poaching, tiny micro-sounds, subtle tapping. At a certain point, a loop joins them, and the music swirls and acquires density. Then comes the beat – the sounds become more danceable and rhythmic until they explode, passing into a trance-like disco. Isalaja stands behind the equipment entirely statically at first but eventually lets herself be absorbed by the trance-like quality of the tracks. It’s an urban disco, but at the same time, it’s organic, as electronic beats intertwine with natural sounds – swishes, pochoirs, and trim, almost primal elements.

I’m at the Odysseus Festival, an event organized by Matti Nives. I had known him for more than a decade, back when he co-organized the Flow Festival – today one of the most significant music events in this part of Europe. In 2013, he created his own We Jazz Festival from scratch, and three years later, he set up a label under the same name. His initial focus was on Finnish artists, but he quickly expanded across Europe and the world. Today, We Jazz presents a broad cross-section of musicians – from Y-Otis, Linda Fredrikson, and Koma Saxo to Amirtha Kidambi, Jason Nazarry, and Peter Evans. It explores new directions in European jazz, reminiscent of International Anthem’s activities in Chicago – a broad, bold, and unbounded approach. Alongside the label is We Jazz Magazine, which sets the tone for conversations about jazz.

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In 2021, the Odysseus Festival was born on Lonna Island, and within three years, it had grown so much that it had to move to Kulttuuritehdas Korjaamo in 2024. Its idea? World music – not in the classic, commercialized ‘world music’ view, but as an authentic journey through the sounds of different corners of the globe. There are no headliners and no divisions between major and minor artists. Origins matter but are not the focus of the program. It is a true musical odyssey in which the artist’s country is not a marketing buzzword but a natural context. On the festival posters, you won’t find country abbreviations next to the names of the bands. So, the audience listens to the music without prejudice, allowing themselves to absorb it fully.

Thanks to Matti Nives’ activities, Helsinki is one of the most interesting places for jazz lovers and musical explorers. The Odysseus Festival celebrates sound and a manifesto for equality and openness – an idea that resonates ever more strongly in music.

Odysseus stands out in many ways. It takes place in the summer, but mainly in enclosed spaces. It does not escalate to a grand scale, although the 2024 edition forced a move from the island to the mainland. The festival looks at music broadly – jazz, electronica, tradition, and experimentation mixed here in a massive cauldron of carelessness. It’s a festival recognizing that rigid categories must be abandoned in a fluid reality.

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That is why it surprises me. For example, with the band Ainon – two strings, saxophone and percussion, a subtle, intricately developed narrative. Or Superposition, an unimaginable quartet in many countries because the men play exclusively in the rhythm section. Linda Fredrikson on alto and baritone and Adele Sauros on soprano and tenor have so much power together that I can feel it when I’m just behind them but also when I’m standing at the end of Vaunusali’s room.

Odysseus also draws on traditional and post-traditional music from the world’s remotest corners. Ustad Noor Bakhsh lulls into a trance with his hypnotic playing on the Electric Benju – the sounds flow, swirl, and, metrically, suspended in space. Širom plays “only three pieces” in a small cinema room. Still, they last almost 40 minutes – their sonic performance is at once meditative, playing with the acoustics of the space and with unexpected turns – here sounds are born from dozens of instruments, and there suddenly appears scattered confetti.

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Ensemble Nist-Nah, on the other hand, is a gamelan ensemble led by Will Guthrie, an Australian drummer. They are playing when sitting among the audience, assaulting the senses with a cascade of polyphonic percussion. Kamilya Jubran, on the oud, weaves lyrical song laments from the heart of Palestine, while Victor Herrero charms with warm, melancholy Spanish melodies. “How different it is to play here,” he says at one point. “In Spain, I would walk into this room from the hustle and bustle of the street; in Helsinki, it is empty and quiet.” His lyrical, only acoustic tracks sound very powerful.

There are also cross-genre bands, like Horse Lords, who combine minimalism, microtonality, and folk in their mathematical, trance-like formula—great and concentrated, as always. Or KMRU, who, on the second day, after midnight, built a linear, suspended drone-ambient sound space in the Kulmasali room.

I leave the Odysseus Festival with a bag of vinyl and a head full of memories. It’s a festival built originally and against global trends. But this is Helsinki, and with the name We Jazz, there are no doubts about its course. One moment between the concerts, I had a chance to go to Hi-5 with Nives, and I was going fast to get a place for another concert. “Too many good concerts to have time to speak with you!” I write to him a few days later, and he very soon answer: “That’s the best reason for not speaking with me!”.

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