.............................................................
GUITAROLOGY ON TWELVE STRINGS

There’s an old link between the two guitarists. In 1999 they both played with sax player Daniel Erdmann in Berlin. But these were different projects. Their music crossed later, attempting to form an improvisatory common language.
Jaak Sooäär’s (b. 1972) guitar ignites spontaneous improvisations, detonates dance beats, bursts noise envelopes and showers jazz- & rock-sharpnel.
At the moment, he is one of the busiest musicians on the Estonian jazz scene. It seems that he has co-operated with everyone who has something to say in the jazz related music. Sooäär is also one of the very few Estonian jazzmen who often performs abroad.
He has played with Daniel Erdmann, Pierre Dørge, Han Bennink, Raoul Björkenheim, Achille Succi, Sture Ericsson and Arkadi Gotesman. He played in all Scandinavian countries, Baltic States, Russia, Germany, France and Holland.
In the 1990s he studied in the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. In 1998 founded The Dynamite Vikings, which released “Vikingology” on the Cope Records in 2002.
In 2001, Sooäär played at Jazzkaar with his jungle-country-ambient-jazz-metal-acid-pop duo Almost Zebra, started in 1999 with Danish drummer Kartsen Mathiesen.
He has participated in numerous other projects. The most known in Estonia is the folk-jazz group Eesti Keeled, founded in 1999. Sooäär has composed and arranged most of their music. In 1999, he started the Dessert Time, duo with German sax player Daniel Erdmann, playing, as they call it themselves – “free happy jazz” – an uninhibited dialogue full of sharp turns of the phrase and full-throttle changes of subjects.
Currently Jaak Sooäär teaches guitar in the Estonian Music Academy.

Kalle Kalima (b 1973) is a jazz musician and composer. Hailing from the culturally diverse city of Helsinki, Kalima began his journey into sound with piano lessons at the age of six. Five years later he switched over to the guitar.
He studied music in the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and in the Hans Eisner music College in Berlin. He has studied with such influential teachers as ace trombonist Jiggs Whigham, sax player Jukka Perko and guitar experimentator Raoul Björkenheim.
Kalima’s bands in Berlin were the Kalima Trio and Momentum Impacto. In Finland he has another trio and a band called Nuijamiehet. Kalle Kalima has worked with guitarist Marc Ducret, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, sax players Kari “Sonny” Heinilä, Volker Schlott and Henrik Wahlsdorf, drummers Mikko Hassinen and Teppo Mäkynen and the Avanti! Orchestra.
In his capacity as a composer, Kalima looks at the world through a set of two telescopes: One lense reflects the free jazz tradition pioneered by the Coltrane-Coleman axis, the other looks at the Sibelian soundscapes of our indigenous type of Fenno-Ugrian creative madness.
As a guitarist, Kalima’s jangly playing echoes his early love of Wes Montgomery but also takes its cue from the more postmodernist sweet n’sour meanderings of Bill Frisell, Fred Frith and Raoul Björkenheim.
Kalle Kalima stands in the forefront of Nordic aesthetic anarchy.