Aki Rissanen, the 36-year-old Finnish composer and improviser, is a classical graduate who found jazz, winning plaudits for it at festivals as big as Montreux, and star collaborators including US saxophonist Dave Liebman. Rissanen’s left-field metamorphoses of the familiar have been notable in his compatriot Verneri Pohjola’s bands. Amorandom, an acoustic trio set and his own fifth release, offers plenty more of that. The R&B hooks of Robert Glasper or the contrapuntal flows of Brad Mehldau might flicker by, but Rissanen resets everything within an architecture influenced by minimalism, serial music and radical massaging of harmony. Some pieces (the rhythm-teasing Pulsar, or For Rainbows, with its surging, left-right melodic chases) deliver advanced ideas with a street-sharp attack, and on For Jimmy Giuffre and Bird Vision swing grooves and bebop shapes are fascinatingly twisted out of line. A little more of the latter might better counterbalance an occasionally laboratory-like air, but Rissanen’s fine trio is a formidable force, with fresh musical intelligence to match flawless techniques.
