Iro Haarla
“Light, darkness, warmth, coldness, a certain desolateness, calmness, stormy emotions — strong contrasts between light and shade. All these contrasts take form in Finnish nature and in the character of the Finns. These feelings are very often hidden in the innermost corners of their hearts. The music expresses these feelings and sounds in the North.”
Iro Haarla was born in 1956 and studied piano and composition at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy and jazz and improvising with Heikki Sarmanto. Early jazz role models included Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and especially Paul Bley whose “silence and dissonance” proved influential. Among classical composers who have provided inspiration Haarla cites Sibelius, Ravel, Verdi, Penderecki and Pärt.
At the age of 20, Haarla took up the [...]
“Light, darkness, warmth, coldness, a certain desolateness, calmness, stormy emotions — strong contrasts between light and shade. All these contrasts take form in Finnish nature and in the character of the Finns. These feelings are very often hidden in the innermost corners of their hearts. The music expresses these feelings and sounds in the North.”
Iro Haarla was born in 1956 and studied piano and composition at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy and jazz and improvising with Heikki Sarmanto. Early jazz role models included Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and especially Paul Bley whose “silence and dissonance” proved influential. Among classical composers who have provided inspiration Haarla cites Sibelius, Ravel, Verdi, Penderecki and Pärt.
At the age of 20, Haarla took up the harp and is entirely self-taught on the instrument. She says: “Edward Vesala gave me the idea to play a harp, because he needed a harpist who could also improvise. I’m very thankful to him for that”.
Haarla dedicated herself exclusively to the music of the Finnish drummer (and her late husband) Edward Vesala for two decades (“I didn’t play my own music at all before my husband’s death,” she told the Washington Post. “Edward Vesala was such a powerful and great musician that I used all my skills and knowledge to help him with his works”). With Vesala, Haarla played the piano and synthesizers as well as harp. She also co-composed and arranged Vesala’s music, including music for plays, films, works for chamber orchestra and a number of recordings.
After Vesala’s death in 1999, she began to record and perform in other contexts. A duo with saxophonist Pepa Päivenmen was followed by a further duo with bassist Ulf Krokfors. Haarla and Krokfors co-lead the nine-piece band Loco Motife. Iro has also composed music for the UMO Jazz Orchestra (in 2002 for Tomasz Stanko as soloist, and in 2006 for a “UMO plays Haarla” event in Helsinki and for a suite of pieces premiered in Tampere).
Haarla’s debut as leader on ECM was Northbound, an album of subtle, exploratory music for quintet, featuring Trygve Seim (saxophone), Mathias Eick (trumpet), Uffe Krokfors (double bass), and Jon Christensen (drums). “Well worth the wait,” was the verdict of All About Jazz’s John Kelman. “Haarla's fluid writing is deeply melodic, but it retains a certain cool melancholy that reflects her northern roots,” he wrote. “Her sometimes delicate, sometimes sweeping harp playing lends an acutely visual quality.” Of the same quintet’s second release, Vespers, Thomas Conrad wrote in Jazztime: “Few jazz artists are as successful as Haarla in creating a world, a scope of feeling, and making it their own.” Ante Lucem, a four-part composition for jazz quintet and symphony orchestra, is released on ECM in 2016.
In 2006, Haarla won the Georgie Award, the highest honour for a Finnish Jazz Musician. In autumn 2015, she began playing in a new trio with Ulf Krokfors (bass) and Markku Ounaskari (drums and percussion).
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