10 Anniversary Alternate Takes

In 2015, Jazzaggression released the debut album from the Teemu Åkerblom Quartet. It became a success and was one of the key reasons we continued putting out new music in the following years. It was also our first-ever Jazzaggression release featuring new music. “Got a chance to record an album, didn’t want to fuck it up, and the producer was breathing down my neck,” Teemu recalls. And what a great album it turned out to be. Jazzman reached out and selected one of the tracks for their Spiritual Jazz compilation, while several cuts landed on national jazz radio playlists in Denmark. Legendary Welsh bassist Daryl Runswick praised Ville Vannemaa as “the greatest sax sensation I’ve heard in many years.” Swedish magazine Orkesterjournalen noted, “we’ve got a good young composer here,” alongside several other glowing reviews. The album has aged beautifully and remains, to this day, the most streamed Finnish Jazzaggression release. Featuring some of the finest young talents of that era, including Verneri Pohjola, it was also a true AAA — fully analog recorded, mixed, and processed album. The sound was, and still is, incredibly vivid. Now, 10 years later…we asked Abdias Assefa, who mixed the original, to pull out the old tapes. We had them transferred, went through every alternate take, and selected the versions presented here. To our ears, the music and the sound are just as strong today as they were a decade ago. To celebrate the anniversary, we decided to create a very limited lathe-cut edition of just 50 copies. A full 500-copy vinyl run wouldn’t have made sense for a project like this — but as a special 50-copy collector’s edition, it becomes something unique, personal, and fun. A small tribute to an album that meant a lot to us, and still does. Comes in reused sleeves and individually numbered.