The career of pianist and composer Heikki Sarmanto spans five decades and has seem him work with various genres from jazz and avantgarde to classical and even opera. His artistic roots lie, however, in the so-called new jazz music of the sixties. It is this free-flowing and more avant-garde side to Sarmanto that the three album series The Helsinki Tapes wants to emphasize. The music on these three albums was recorded live at the N-Club, a small basement rock club in Helsinki in 1971 and 1972. A far cry from the polished stages of concert halls, the four-track recordings present a young and hungry band in their most creative and experimenting phase. These tapes lay forgotten for over four decades and are now presented in their full cleaned-up and remastered glory.Sarmanto studied music at the Berklee College in Boston in the late sixties, which is where he assembled his group Heikki Sarmanto Serious Music Ensemble. The group connected young, creative musicians from Finland and America - Heikki's brother Pekka on bass, Juhani Aaltonen on saxophone, Craig Herndon on drums and Lance Gunderson on guitar. Heikki himself took up a Fender Rhodes keyboard, not yet a common instrument in Scandinavia. The young quintet wanted to question the accepted norms in music, on which the choice of band name was a comment. "Serious Music Orchestra is a comment on the cultural status quo of the time, as the term 'serious music' was used to refer to the western classical tradition only. As if no other music would be worth of serious thought - and African-American jazz was the last thing to be taken seriously", recalls Sarmanto.Serious Music Ensemble lived for a couple of intense years and performed on Sarmanto's albums Like a Fragonard and Counterbalance. Due to studio and label constraints the albums ended up relatively clean, and the furious, experimental side to the band was kept largely under wraps.
