Seven Hills: imbued with the spirit of Bill Evans

Alexi Tuomarila
Seven Hills
Edition ***1/2
Listen to 02, and Dark Eyes, and you’ll start to gain a glimpse of a hugely talented pianist whose much interrupted story starts again with Seven Hills. The Finn, also well known in Belgium having studied and lived there and where his wider reputation gained ground, has had his ups and downs as a fickle major label built him up and knocked him down before Tomasz Stańko, a great appreciator of piano talent, brought him into the fold to record Dark Eyes in 2009. Seven Hills, relating in its title to Lisbon, not the more obvious Rome,is increasingly, as the album develops, imbued with the spirit of Bill Evans and it’s a feeling that grows and grows like a rhapsody. With Tuomarila are highly cultured bassist Mats Eilertsen who’s also a member of Tord Gustavsen’s ensemble, and ex-Stańko drummer Olavi Louhivuori, plus Lisbon-born guitarist André Fernandes, who plays a little like Jakob Bro, on a couple of tracks. Nine tracks in all, beginning with the guitar-flavoured title track highlights are the fast flow of ‘Cyan’ decanting into unaffected melodicism; later ‘Visitor Q’ is gloriously quiet and unvarnished; and then Eilertsen’s bass opening to the folkloric ‘Miss’ has an involving poignancy that the album as a whole shares without being twee at all. The earlier ‘Skuld’ draws together a range of influences, again Bill Evans and perhaps Jan Johansson, with Eilertsen’s buzzy drone and jump-off riff bringing out the subtlety of Louhivuori, as Tuomarila measures his solo like a surveyor with a theodolite. SG
Alexi Tuomarila, above. Photo: Edition