Iiro Rantala
My History of Jazz and
My Working Class Hero

WITH hardly a con-ventional route for a jazz pianist, Iiro Rantala was born in Helsinki in 1970, had a powerful musical upbringing as a member of Cantored Minores, a renowned Finnish boys’ choir, an education as a classical pianist and then a course in jazz studies at the Manhattan School of Music.

He performed for 18 years as part of the iconoclastic jazz group the Trio Toykeat (“The Rotten Trio”) while continuing to play classical piano and writing for films, television and theatre.

His 2012 album My History of Jazz is a musical narrative of his life and how he embraced a polyglot of jazz influences.

“Bach’s music became my life already when I was six,” he writes. “At the age of 13 I heard jazz and it suckered me into its fascinating world. I wanted to become an improvisator, composer, performer and band leader.”

And it is Rantala’s brilliance as an “improvisator” that radiates through his story, which begins and ends where he began, with Bach. He has bandmates Lars Danielsson on bass and cello, drummer Morten Lund and violinist Adam Baldych to spin his chronicle with, and from the outset of Bach’s aria they play with a compelling unity. They romp through Gershwin’s Liza straight after, followed by the Ellingtonian standby Caravan written by trombonist Juan Tizol and Monk’s Eronel — and you realise again how boundaries between genres of music are entirely artificial. Baldych’s violin sizzles in Caravan and Rantala is joyously inventive all through Eronel as Danielsson’s bass bounces beside him.

He plays Kurt Weill’s September Song in a quasi-stride style, and while he openly says that he’s never played the blues, his expression of what he calls “Scandinavian melancholiness” wafts from the quartet’s rendition of Danny’s Dream written by the virtuoso Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin, with a dextrously plucked cello solo by Danielsson.

“I just don’t know why I love John Lennon’s songs so much,” confessed Rantala in the sleeve notes of his 2015 album My Working Class Hero. “Maybe because I really am from a working-class family. My mother and father used to run a bicycle store in Helsinki, and that’s where I grew up. I heard Lennon before I knew any jazz. Happy Xmas was the first encounter with his music when I sang it in our music class choir in 1983. Even back then it took my breath away. How can this guy write something so simple yet so powerful at the same time? Same effect with Imagine.”

Lennon and McCartney’s Norwegian Wood begins with a repeated percussive chord like nature’s beating heart, before Rantala’s melodic sense embroiders the familiar tune with chiming keyboard runs. The title tune begins as a laborious toll of life, as if the tune is being forged at a sonic smithy as it rises to a climax which is the tune itself, repeated and carved into sound. In Just Like Starting Over the tune takes a long time to arrive but when it comes it is lucid and transparent.
Rantala plays Woman without concealment, before the pace changes and pianist becomes “improvisator” striking the keys hard and true on the cusp of the tune. Then it is Imagine played as if the melody were being discovered all over again and each note carrying fast its indelible word and inseparable meaning.

I had always thought Help an ephemeral song and unremarkable tune, but Rantala gives it a new depth. He pounds out its theme, then suddenly its chorus becomes gentle, almost pleading its message before it reverts to a rushing foray of notes until the chorus next time. After this, you feel you’ll never hear it in the same way again.

Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Oh My Love is taken swiftly as a running tune, almost as a preface to Lennon and McCartney’s In My Life, played as if the theme were leaning sideways, away from itself, but still with an emphatic power. And when the melody finally comes it’s as if it is suddenly standing upright to cast its message out into the world with a forthright beauty.

The listener can imagine how the schoolboy Rantala was so impressed and affected by Happy Xmas (War is Over) and the strength of Lennon’s tunemaking. He introduces All You Need is Love by a half-chorus of God Save the Queen, and how you wish that the former were the national anthem, or Imagine, or snatches of both. One day maybe, but in the meantime play Rantala’s immensely fine and moving album. It makes you wish that the Liverpool boy could hear it too, all the way from Finland and his dad’s bike shop.