QUARTPHONIC – ​ELENA MINDRU THIRD STREAM PROJECT

Line-up:
Elena Mîndru – voice, compositions
Sampo Kasurinen – soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, compositions
Tuomas J. Turunen – piano, compositions
Eero Seppä – double bass
Anssi Tirkkonen – drums
Maija Linkola – violin 1
Laura Airola – violin 2
Jussi Tuhkanen – viola
Sirja Nironen – cello
Elena Mindru Third Stream Project is the newest group of the Helsinki-based
jazz singer, Montreux Jazz Voice Competition awardee
Elena Mindru. It features the great Finnish violinist Maija Linkola together with her string quartet and includes brand new compositions written by Sampo Kasurinen, Artturi Rönkä, Visa-Pekka Mertanen, Tuomas J. Turunen, Alex Simu and Elena Mîndru. Their music is a very pleasant mixture of jazz and classical.
Each work performed by the group has its own story behind, linked together by the fact that the Montreux Jazz Voice Competition awardee singer Elena Mîndru wrote the lyrics or added the lyrics of well-known poems to most of the songs, working closely with all the composers. The idea of this kind of project was fervent in Elena’s thoughts for a long time. Trained as a classical violin player in her childhood, the jazz singer Elena Mindru chose the same instrumentation for her final masters exam in Sibelius Academy in 2013. Collaborating with all the above-mentioned composers for her project Symphonic meets Jazz (a series of concerts with philharmonic orchestras in Romania) made possible the adaptation of the performed works for her jazz quartet (which features the saxophone player Sampo Kasurinen) and Maija Linkola’s string quartet.
The group is one of the last bands that had the chance to record in the Yle M1 Studio in September 2015, having Markus Partanen as the producer of the session. The outcome of their recording session in Yle is to be released as an album (third for Elena Mîndru) in the spring of 2016, within the April Jazz Festival 2016, on 23rd of April in Sellosali.