Lighthouse Stories
Duo Esa Pietilä & Mart Soo
A genre-free album featuring fusion of jazz, experimental with modern electronic textures, and showcasing the duo’s ability to create instantaneous, complex compositions.
Defiance
Mart Soo and Esa Pietilä combine the worlds of acoustic playing and diverse use of live-electronics. The Sonic atmospheres of the album are inspired by both artist´s interest in different sceneries at sea – the focus is at the most fascinating Lighthouses of the Finnish and Estonian coastlines which rise up imaginary stories out. The two talented musicians have made a significant impact in the international jazz scene and are known for their exceptional improvisational skills, making each performance a unique and dynamic experience.
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Selected Audio
Video
About the Project
Throughout, Pietilä transforms the saxophone into more than an instrument — it becomes a resonant body, a vessel for exploration, and a voice of resistance. From fragile whispers to eruptive power, Defiance reveals the saxophone as unbound, elemental, and vital.
This album is both a personal artistic statement and an invitation to listeners: to enter sound worlds where each resonance is defiant, each silence charged, and every breath becomes discovery.
Together, these pieces form a cycle of sound worlds — elemental, abstract, and deeply human. In them, I seek not only to expand the language of the saxophone, but also to test the edges of what one breath, one body, and one instrument can say against silence.
— Esa Pietilä
Credits:
Esa Pietilä, Tenor Saxophone & compositions
Recorded at Church of St. Lawrence, Vantaa, Finland, Sept 15.–16.2025
Record engineer: Enno Mäemets
Recording producer: Viive Mäemets
Mixed and mastered by Enno Mäemets at Editroom
Produced by Esa Pietilä
photos ©Mikko Hannula
ORCHID CLASSICS , ORC 100418