Pavel Tukki  “Salt and Water”

“Salt and Water” is a new step in fine-tuning the most gentle kind of “ambient jazz” by composer and performer Pavel Tukki, who in his new solo project reveals himself also through his performance as a fine poet and vocalist.  Tukki, creator of “Nega,” which is being simultaneously re-released, continues to broaden the borders of minimalism, cool jazz and acoustic ambient in search of his own language to convey the subtle nuances of mood and his lyrical attitude to the world.

The album consists of two parts. “Salt” is the primary and more structured of the two, with its fully arranged and orchestrated vocal works.  Appropriately, only its six pieces are named and numbered.  The second component, “water,” are ambient minimalist piano pieces with their title names appearing erased from the album jacket.  These ephemeral, transparent “ambios” flow liquidly into each other and out into the surrounding space, where they continue to sound in pauses as long as a full minute.  In effect, Tukki immerses listeners into silence to tune them into listening to the world as music.

Together salt and water form the sea and the tears.  On the album jacket the sound drops roll down in broken crystalline chords from the eyes of a vast outlined face that gazes with compassion at a wandering person, the drops freezing into orbs on the sand.  The melancholy of salt and water, verbalized in Tukki’s poetry, is colored in light blue.  A poet’s state of bliss in union with the nature is conveyed through deep, impressionistic music.  Like Debussy and Eric Satie, Tukki strives to register a transient impression, a brief moment of happiness in sound. These impressions have been gathered from his weighty journeys through the Caucasus, Pamir, and Himalayan Mountains, the wild shores of Northern Cyprus and other rarely trodden places.  This sublime state is also expressed in the word of late 1800-1900’s Spaniard modernist Juan Ramon Himenes whose poetry echoes in Tukki’s and is merged into his music (“Redondez”).  The images of “the pure poetry” unfold in songs aglow with Tukki’s warm, sensitized voice, and even more eloquently, through his instrumental pieces.

The album has a unique curvaceous composition.  The first sounds of the new life in a brief piano introduction begins the life cycle of the album’s lyrical hero.  Over its course the instrumental pieces grow out of vocal sections and reach an emotional peak in “Prostranstvie” (“Trip in Space”), ending with his farewell in “Yo No Volvere” (“I Am Not Coming Back.”)  This piece is based in an old vinyl record scratch with a gramophone sound – like a heart’s faltering rhythm – and the closing piano retro lasts as long as the agony of a dying breath.  But, after the end is a long pause, and from its silence emerge beautiful chords, as if tears purified from salt by the sound of rain, surf and tropical nights.  The reverse countdown of time begins in the mirror space-time continuum.  The piano pieces become even more ephemeral as they filter down to the most airy, sublime ones, and to a silence preceding the new birth…  The circle closes in “the round eternity” (Himenes’ “eternidad redonda”). 

Pavel Tukki adapts music styles to the sensibilities of the 21st century soul who strives to comprehend the connection of the ages and the circle of being and non-being. As such, Tukki creates a new musical epos – through which new facets of romantic jazz, outworldly ambient music and stirring minimalism are exposed. His new project creates music for multiple listening, immersion and inner equilibrium.

Anna Zontova      http://home.earthlink.net/~annazontova