We Jazz

As We Jazz festival returns for a sixth time this weekend, the ever evolving event continues to “introduce the best possible music and aims to challenge and renew the ways of presenting jazz.” Put it another way, We Jazz has become a permanent fixture of the Finnish festival calendar, with precision curation that also reveals hidden layers of location around Helsinki town. It’s a special happening.

Today at OQM we’re very happy to bring you a playlist of some of the music featured at this years We Jazz, curated by the artistic director of the festival, Matti Nives.

We Jazz X One Quart Magazine

“I wanted to select 10 great tracks from artists performing at We Jazz 2018 as an introduction to the event. It was a difficult task, because there’s so much music within each festival, and all of it is hand picked and worthy of attention. Here, we move from the timeless Slavic swing of the great Polish composer Krzysztof Komeda (honored at We Jazz by Dalindèo) all the way to Kaukolampi‘s world of sound, somewhere far away from the roots of jazz, yet probably closer than we think. Kaukolampi’s project of making a new work at the festival from samples sourced from the first 10 LP’s on the We Jazz Records catalogue will offer us a new angle into what the label is releasing. Mopo, paired here with scene legend Jimi Tenor, will host their own fest-within-fest, Mopocalypse Festival. I wonder if they have invited Jimi along for the ride for the upcoming party as well, for I have no knowledge of what will take place at the Mopocalypse event. I embrace the unknown and I’m thankful to Mopo for accepting the task of designing their own sub-event. After all, it enables me to attend our own festival knowing that I’m in for a surprise!”

We Jazz 2018 runs from the 2nd-9th Dec. in various venues around Helsinki. Find the program for We Jazz here, tickets from here and all other info from the We Jazz 2018 page