Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/15/2015
7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Location
Musicians Union Hall, Local 6

Category(ies)

• Music
• Vocal
• Ensemble
• Symphonic

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$10-$15

Heikki Koskinen’s Northern Winds and Voices

• Kati Pienimäki Schenker — vocals
• Steve Heckman — saxophone, flutes, clarinets
• Rent Romus — saxophone, flutes, kantele
• Noah Schenker — bass
• Heikki Koskinen — piano, e-tpt, tenor recorder, kantele

Northern Winds and Voices was created by composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist Heikki Koskinen for a project featuring new and old Nordic and Finnish songs arranged in innovative new ways exploring the universal connections between immigrants and their motherlands. NW&V brings together musicians from many of Heikki’s past projects and performances utilizing each musician’s unique sound in creating new sonic textures and ways to interpret these songs, which are well known to the Finnish community, but arranged in non-traditional ways, influenced by straight ahead and “free” jazz as well as tangos, marches and archaic folk music. NW&V is currently recording an album to be released in the Spring 2016.

Heikki “Mike” Koskinen is a recording artist, composer, and educator currently living in San Francisco. Koskinen was chosen in “Rytmi” magazine critics polls as Finland’s top jazz trumpet player in the 1970’s. He left his native Finland to study jazz at the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1973. Among his teachers at Berklee were Herb Pomeroy, Gary Burton and Michael Gibbs. He also studied privately with Charlie Banacos. He later moved to San Francisco in 1977.

Koskinen is the recipient of several Finnish composing grants, recorded several albums, and won awards as an innovative children’s music teacher. His Bay Area bands, with Heikki on trumpet and piano, have featured such musicians as Hadley Caliman, Steve Heckman, Mark Levine, Joe Bonner, Benny Green, Larry Hancock and Michael Spiro.

His main instruments these days are piano, the Morrison Digital Trumpet as well as the tenor recorder. Besides performing, he teaches music in the Bay Area, writes music for media and groups of all sizes. He served as coordinator and host of the local radio program, “Studio Finland” for ten years.

Northern Winds and Voices is made possible by a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music.