Acclaimed guitarist and oud player Jussi Reijonen launches sayr, his intimate new series of recordings for solo string instrument, with a double release of two stunning new albums: Available October 24, 2025 via unmusic, sayr: salt | thirst and sayr: kaiho – live in helsinki are haunting meditations on finding the still point amid motion and chaos.
“★★★★½ Unlike anything in memory; it doesn’t simply alternate worldly assortments of styles but rather creates a new, genre-less, form… one of the best recordings of 2022.” —Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz on Jussi’s album Three Seconds | Kolme Toista
“Three Seconds | Kolme Toista is a stunner. This album is a single, unified, diverse, overwhelming statement.” — JazzTimes
With sayr, his new series of improvised recordings for solo string instrument, Finnish-born guitarist, Arabic oud player and composer Jussi Reijonen offers an intimate, meditative counterpoint to the ambitious 5—movement suite heard on his acclaimed 2022 large ensemble album Three Seconds | Kolme Toista. The starkly contrasting series launches with two releases: sayr: salt |thirst, and sayr: kaiho – live in helsinki, both available October 24, 2025 via Reijonen’s label unmusic.
In early reviews, sayr: salt | thirst earned ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ from HIFImaailma (Finland), while Thierry De Clemensat wrote in Paris Move: “To listen to this record is to hear an entire atlas of musical voices… This is not quotation or pastiche—it is absorption. Reijonen’s gift is to let these echoes coexist, not as borrowed idioms but as organic elements of his own language… sayr: salt | thirst is less an album than a statement of artistic identity: uncompromising, borderless, and profoundly human. It is a reminder that some of the most enduring music is not made by committee or calculation, but by a single musician listening deeply, to memory, to silence, and to the resonances of a world he has lived.”
Reflecting on the creative process that led to sayr as a framework for a series of improvised solo recordings that Reijonen plans to release between his ensemble works, he says: “I have of late found myself drawn to solitary reflection and introspection: to the small, simple and sparse, the rugged earthy, the gnarly unpretty; and most of all, to bare feet in soil; to roots and branches; to paths less – or differently – predetermined… sayr has become a kind of musical diary: an ever-growing, ever-evolving musical organism that is like a metaphorically Arabic taqsim-inspired solo improvisation through time, place and memory.”
In these solo improvisations, Reijonen ardently seeks the still point described by T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
–T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton: II (1936)
“For me, Eliot’s lines eloquently capture how the perception of change or motion in the world around us is so dependent on how a person is or isn’t in motion,” says Reijonen. “Put another way, for there to be motion, there needs to be stillness as its counterpoint and vice versa, since through their dance, each defines the other.”
Reijonen’s series is centered around a metaphorical reframing of the concept of “sayr” as found in Arabic music — literally, “course” or “motion” – referring here to a musical pathway unfolding through improvisation in an acoustemological memory palace: a pathway of memory recalled and reimagined through music, refracting in reverse in the space between sound and personal experience. Originally inspired by the archaic sound and feel of a late-1940s Gibson LG-2 steel-string acoustic guitar generously gifted to Reijonen by a former student, sayr uses a set of pre-composed musical gestures as loci or touchstones. Like rooms in a memory palace, Reijonen navigates freely between them through improvisation, letting memories surface through the sounds themselves. Each gestural locus becomes a portal, triggering emotional and sensory echoes shaped by his life across Northern Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, Lebanon, and the United States.
The music couldn’t be more different than Reijonen’s ambitious 2022 nonet album Three Seconds | Kolme Toista, which explored the deep pool of influences and experiences of his childhood spent on the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, the Middle East and East Africa, as well as 13 years in the United States as an adult, but it all springs from a similar, very personal well. As Reijonen explains, “The poetry of acoustemology constituting ‘sonic experience as a way of knowing’ resonates deeply with my own story, and its unfolding through music. As I got into my late teens and early twenties, then resettled back in Finland for the time-being, I started to hear ever-more-persistent echoes of my childhood in Jordan, Tanzania, Oman and Lebanon in what was coming out of my then-new steel-string acoustic guitar. Pulling the thread more led me to on impulse buy an oud in Fes in northern Morocco in 2003. It’s difficult to describe that moment in words: the oud sounded, smelled, looked and felt like home. I remembered Fairuz singing through distorting transistor radios. I remembered the feeling of Umm Kulthum. I remembered the feeling of Farid al-Atrash, Sabah Fakhri and Wadih El Safi. Since then, I’ve been pulling on this thread of memory, trying to figure out where these echoes were coming from, and where they might go if I found a way to put them together.”
Now, returning to the sonority of steel-string acoustic guitar more than 20 years later at age 44, he says, “The experience of playing this beautiful old Gibson acoustic guitar has been like having a deep conversation with an old friend, a wise old soul sharing its stories over a cup of coffee. It reawakened something: I noticed again and again that I can access and process memories through encountering and interacting with particular sounds, and especially when done in improvisation, found myself often surprised at the depth of the entanglement between the pathways of memory that unveiled themselves. I then started keeping a journal reflecting on my formative life phases in Northern Finland, the Middle East, East Africa and the U.S., and it hit me that through autodidactically learning music through much of those times, I may have subconsciously been associating memories of personal experiences with musical sounds for processing later. Now, when I interact with certain sounds, those memories come alive again, but from a new perspective. This led me to wonder if throughout my life I had inadvertently constructed a memory palace of sound. sayr reflects an improvised pathway through its rooms, its nooks and crannies.”
sayr: salt | thirst was recorded in one fully improvised take at Reijonen’s home studio on steel-string acoustic guitar one afternoon in March 2025 and is split into two contrasting arcs, “salt” and “thirst” as on two sides of a vinyl LP. The performance weaves textural references of various string instruments from around the world – the guitar, the Finnish kantele, the Arabic oud, the Moroccan sintir, and the West African kora – into a compelling whole refracting echoes of Hamza El Din, Farid al-Atrash, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ali Farka Touré, Toumani Diabaté, Mahmoud Guinia, Paco de Lucía, Umm Kulthum, Fairuz and Camarón de la Isla, with the musical form unfolding a personal narrative that vacillates between lament, unease, brightening and transformation.
sayr: kaiho – live in helsinki presents the continued improvised evolution of the materials uncovered on salt | thirst. Performed on steel-string acoustic guitar and the Arabic oud and recorded and filmed live in concert in Helsinki, Finland, on September 19th, 2025, sayr: kaiho is divided into three arcs – “halla” (“frost” in Finnish); “fes” (in homage to the Moroccan medina where he bought his first oud); and “vielä” (“yet” in Finnish). With “kaiho” referring to longing or nostalgia in Finnish – akin to “saudade” in Portuguese and Galician –, the live recording highlights to stunning effect Reijonen’s deep relationships with the sonorities of two string instruments that not only have become so entangled with his own memories, but also share between them a deep historical lineage.
As Reijonen says, “I really cherish sayr for its immediacy and raw honesty. Each performance – or each improvised pathway through my memory palace – not only pushes me as a musician and improviser searching for new musical forms, but through its ethos of no post-production fixes, this music holds up a mirror reflecting where I am and how I really sound at any given moment. On salt: thirst, the only edits done were the removal of me sneezing once, and dividing it into two arcs instead of just one 40-minute track; and kaiho as a document of a live concert performance is untouched aside from mixing and mastering. By extension, sayr has created a space for not only personal reflection, but for discovering and exploring new musical ideas; each improvisation provides new musical loci as new seed materials to water and explore the next time around – whether through improvisation or composition, solo or ensemble.”
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© Ville Tanttu
JUSSI REIJONEN
Born in Rovaniemi, a small town on the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, fretted/fretless guitarist and Arabic oud player Jussi Reijonen is truly a product of liminal spaces. Having grown up in Northern Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman and Lebanon, and spending much of his adulthood in the United States, Jussi has lived a life soaking up sounds, sights, scents and shades of Nordic, Arabic, African and North American aesthetics and expression, all of which are reflected in his creative work as composer, improviser and performer.
His 2022 large ensemble album Three Seconds | Kolme Toista was described as “unlike anything in memory… creates a new, genre-less, form… spellbinding from beginning to end, and full of virtuoso performances… one of the best recordings of 2022” by AllAboutJazz and “a stunner… a unified, diverse, overwhelming statement” by JazzTimes, receiving 5-star reviews and being selected as Best Creative Albums of 2022 by AllAboutJazz and Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by Glide Magazine. His Three Seconds | Kolme Toista nonet was a Jazzahead! 2023 official showcase artist.
Alongside his work as leader, Jussi has collaborated with a diverse array of world-renowned artists, including Jack DeJohnette, Robin Eubanks, Pepe de Lucía, David Fiuczynski, Simon Shaheen, Bassam Saba, Arto Tunçboyacıyan and Dave Weckl. He has performed at prestigious venues like Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress in the U.S., as well as in Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Canada, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.
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JUSSI REIJONEN
sayr: salt | thirst
unmusic – UNCD12025 / UNLP12025
Recorded March 1st, 2025
Worldwide Release Date: Digital, CD and LP October 24, 2025
sayr: kaiho – live in helsinki
unmusic – UNCD22025 / UNLP22025
Recorded live in concert at Musiikkitalo, Helsinki, Finland, September 19th, 2025
Worldwide Release Date: Digital & CD October 24, 2025; LPs to follow
Pronunciation of sayr: “sa-yeer”
Pronunciation of Jussi Reijonen: “You-see Ray-yo-nen”
https://www.jussireijonen.com/