Audience safety at the concerts >>

Note! The Covid-19 passport and ID is required on entry at Culture Factory Korjaamo from 29th October on at all concerts and audience events.

UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra’s Great Voices concert series continues! Israeli jazz singer and composer Efrat Alony, who made her first visit to Finland last autumn, will return to UMO as a soloist for two gigs in November.

For special program New Jewish Folk Songs Efrat Alony has chosen her favorite Israeli standards composed between the 1920s up to contemporary Israeli music, to be masterfully arranged and reshaped by UMO Helsinki’s chief conductor and artistic director Ed Partyka. Partyka’s orchestral finesse and the wide ranged temperament of the songs presented provide the perfect canvas for Alony’s strong, soulful and deep voice, with its marvelous shape-shifting abilities, to slip in and out of different characters and emotions.

Alony, who now lives in Berlin, has fascinated the European press for many years. She has been crowned “one of the most important voices in the German jazz scene”. Her music has been called “popular art songs, highly expressive”, others speak of “pop songs that mysteriously come out of jazz” or “a chamber-jazz parallel world”. Trying to put Alony’s music in a box is a task destined to fail. Every musical compartment would simply be too small. Her ability to compose and sing in between the musical genres – both in Hebrew and English – in her exceptional unique style is what makes her stand out and shine. www.alony.de

Duration 75 minutes, no intermission.

“A new Israeli acquaintance delivered on the promise of UMO’s concert series with her great voice.” Harri Uusitorppa, Helsingin Sanomat

”I’m not sure that there is a category for what Alony does. I’m not sure that there should be. Call it music.”Artsjournal, Doug Ramsey

”The style isn’t quite jazz but something new and cutting edge, sort of an atonal folk-electronica mash. While I confess you may need to recalibrate your sensibility a bit to fully appreciate what Alony is doing, the journey is well worth it. If you appreciate avant-garde music, her sound grows on you fast.” Jazzwax.com, Marc Meyers

UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra’s new concert series Great Voices is dedicated to stellar vocalists from all over the world. The series is curated and conducted by the orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director Ed Partyka. The series continues in March 2022, when the British-Nigerian soul singer and songwriter Ola Onabulé features UMO at Savoy Theatre.

Photo: Carola Schmidt