The Five Corners Quintet – Chasin' the Jazz Gone By (2005)

I've already mentioned in my previous posts how great the jazz scene is in Helsinki. The Five Corners Quintet is one of the greatest jazz bands from Finland's capital. It gets its name from a spot in Helsinki where five streets unite, thus creating five corners. This area is known for its record stores, including Digelius, which is one of the oldest record shops in Helsinki and which focuses on jazz and world music. The Five Corners Quintet started merely as a studio project, but with fame from their recordings, they also decided to tour around Europe, Asia and America. The band was really popular in Japan and this album has won awards from there in addition to awards won in their native Finland. The band includes some of the best jazz musicians in Finland. I guess you might even talk about something of a supergroup with this jazz band.



I don't normally like singing in jazz that much. It almost always makes it sound more commercial than instrumental jazz and I really like the fact that jazz manages to keep away from normal song structures of verse, bridge and chorus. When you add vocals, you quite often end up with some variations of these things. There are a couple of songs on this album with singing and I do think they're my least favourite tracks on the album.

If I'm not mistaken, the album cover picture has been taken on top of a tower building in Tapiola, Espoo, which is the closest bigger town to where I lived my childhood. For the first 15 years of my life, this was usually the place where we would go if we were going to buy clothes or wanted to get more specialised services. I also went to high school around there. It's a very nostalgic place for me.

The album starts with nicely raspy saxophones in Blue Cycles. This song has a nice wavy groove and singer Okou is singing vocals in the song. Just by hearing this first album, you might get a sense of a little more commercial album than what you end up getting in rest of the album. Trading Eights was one of the biggest hits from the album. If you can call any jazz songs hits these days. Anyway, this groovy song has some excellent horn sections and nice pianos. This Could be the Start of Something is another showtune-y song with vocals from Mark Murphy. Straight Up for some reason sounds instantly like Helsinki jazz. I don't know what makes it so, but it just does. There's a nice lazy groove and the trumpets are especially great in this one. Three Corners has lots of vibraphone in it and it reminds me of another Helsinki band, Fredator. Case Study is a swing with some bluesy elements. Lighthouse has some latin rhythms and interesting drums. Unsquare Bossa is a bossa nova song with some excellent rock hammonds. The Devil Kicks is probably my favourite song on the album, because it's more pure jazz song the likes of which we can hear more on the band's second album. There are some excellent bass lines on this song.

I really like the band's second album Hot Corner and that's really the album that introduced me to the band in the first place. This debut album I found later cheaply at a Helsinki-based record shop, so I bought it. It's a great album, but I do think they would be better just playing instrumental songs.

Listen to the album on Spotify.