EMW at Jazzkaar Festival Part Three: the Understated Fusion of ELLIP

Jazzkaar Festival is over now, and as you'd want from any good music festival, it has left attendees with an engaged musical brain on multiple levels. There was a session of morning yoga soundtracked by double bass player Mingo Rajandi. Performers and composers discussed the fate of big band jazz. Singer Stig Rästa, of Eurovision fame, sang his hits alongside a song to get kids excited about brushing their teeth. And, as shown in the last two parts of this series, bands from across Europe and the US got to the core of jazz.

The curation of a jazz festival's lineup is an interesting thing, isn't it? Jazz at Lincoln Center—a key cultural institution in New York City—describes jazz as “a metaphor for Democracy. Because jazz is improvisational, it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression.”

While not every artist was swinging on the ride cymbal, had saxophone or trumpet solos, or walked to the scale of an upright bass player, the artists who played spoke to the freedom and individual expression of the genre. Perhaps jazz has broadened itself through its own fundamental, democratic components.

I certainly find those ideas—along with unconventional rhythmic patterns and front and centre bass parts—in the music of ELLIP, a six-piece band that played at Fotografiska in Tallinn on Friday August 27th, as well as a solo terrace concert the following afternoon with lead singer and songwriter Pille-Riin Karro.

ELLIP Live at Jazzkaar 2021. Photos by Urmo Männi.

Take a listen to “Shivers” and “Fool”, from ELLIP's 2020 EP Four Words, and you'll come across stylish moments of glitches and skips in the drum beat. And then there's that earworm of a chorus in the latest single “Square One,” that moves like a swift left and right stomping dance routine. I'm apt to pry for a cause behind artistic techniques like this, to find a correlation.

However, Karro says, “I don't overthink it too much. When I hear a beat it is mostly clear in a couple of minutes if it speaks to me or not. And I just follow what the beat does and what is naturally in me. Or with 'Square One', I just had that main melody in my head and started building around it.”

This propensity for easygoing music-making fits with her feature on jonas.f.k's disco inflected track “LondonParisChicago.” Then there's Mikk Siemer (AKA Nzea), with whom she worked on Four Words.

Having met through a friend (and sharing the same star sign, which she insists is very important), Karro recounts how she and Siemer “went to the countryside with a hope to just feel good in music and maybe create something, and before we knew it, in nine days we had around 10 songs that were for us something magical.” She talks about the magic that ensues when someone loosens up with a collaborator and doesn't exclusively push their own creative agenda. This experience gave her confidence to take the lead on production for “Square One” and beyond.

Nevertheless, there were more individual evolutions that had to take place early on. Several years ago, Karro took part in an exchange program at Edge Hill University in England, which she has talked about as a prompt for pursuing music. As an artist, she says, “Having like-minded people around me—the community, the growing together, the musical conversations, the concert visits and talks afterwards, the collaborations and so on and so forth—I wouldn't be here without it.” Even in moments of off-time.

One night, when a local jazz quartet was playing on campus, the quartet asked if anyone wanted to come up and sing a song with them. Shaking with nerves, but encouraged by her friend, Karro came up to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was an experience of “self transcendence” as she puts it.

Working as a Raadio 2 DJ (in addition to being a performing musician), her favourite music to spin is the “easy, fun and happy” music of rapper and singing drummer Anderson .Paak, especially his partnership with Bruno Mars, for the duo Silk Sonic. Being a DJ has re-ignited the act of listening to music, which doesn't get much attention when in creation mode.

Karro admits that English language music has shaped her more than Estonian language music, with the latter not being part of her listening as a child. Though she does enjoy old Estonian jazz, I can see how this connection to English language music might be representative of a broader desire in the Estonian music industry to share ideas outside of Estonia.

That said, Karro talks about how much Tallinn has to offer. The city's talent “keeps you on your toes, keeps you wanting to push further and discover more, of yourself and music as well.”

And here's the correlation I was looking for. To her, Jazzkaar, Tallinn's jazz festival, is an event “where all of the musicians are true professionals, lovers of music...” To perform at this festival, having prepared her whole life in that capacity, she says, “I am just so honored to participate and the band and I will and have done all that we can for the people to have an experience to remember.”

In the music of ELLIP, listeners can find encouragement to embrace personal tastes. To not get in the way of ourselves. To not let genres or expectations become a stumbling block. Through jazz, we can open closed doors.'

Written by Vincent Teetsov

Originally published in Estonian Life.