Album Notes

We started this project two years ago, when we were trying to find new, interesting Big Band material. Oulu is well known as a heavy-metal town in the northern part of Finland, and we wanted to develop a new concept and attract new audiences to us. So, we decided to mix jazz and heavy-standards in a way that hasn’t been done before.

We found a brilliant, young heavy-singer Jarkko Ahola, and together with him we chose melodic heavy anthems for re-arrangement. We found some great musicians to write these new arrangements; some of them are profes¬sionals in Finland, like Vellu Halkosalmi, some in Sweden, like Håkan Broström, and some of them are from our own band, Esa Virkkula and Sven Seebeck.

Our only guideline to them all was to do justice to the original while letting the jazzy big band sounds come through in the music. And when we hit our first rehearsal in September 2009, I heard this amazing sound: the strong lead vocal together with these great big band-arrangements was so powerful that I was immediately convinced we would have to put a record out. And now we have done that.

This is our first album, and I’m very proud of it. It is great that we can produce new jazz music here in northern part of Finland.

Long Live Rock and Roll!