Josefiina Vannesluoma & Mortal Lease

Vocalist, flutist and voice lecturer Josefiina Vannesluoma (b. 1990) is best known from the vocal ensemble Signe that features an unusual lineup of three vocalists and a double bass. Of their five albums, two have already been nominated for the Jazz Emma Award, Finland’s Grammy for the jazz album of the year, and one for the Teosto Prize. 

Vannesluoma, a Master of Music, started her solo career also from the top as her debut solo project The Mortal Lease (2023) was one of the five nominees for the Jazz Emma last spring, 2024. The two-horned bronze award was instead given to her friend Selma Savolainen, also a vocalist and composer in Signe. Savolainen performed her award-winning songs at Tampere Jazz Happening already in November 2022 – in the same place, on the same day and at the same time as Vannesluoma will this year. 

Like Savolainen, Vannesluoma likes to reach out beyond jazz, both as a musician and as a composer. Or perhaps she too envisions jazz as an attitude instead of a style – as a way and “a permission” to take liberties, to express her own musical preferences. Her debut The Mortal Lease, which spans a wide range of styles and moods, is exemplary in this respect and exceptional in its premise, which is literary. It is based on a series of poems of the same name that tell the story of a passionate yet ill-fated summer affair, written by American author Edith Wharton and published in 1909. The most famous work of the privileged Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920), centres on the same upper-class New York milieu and was adapted into an Oscar-winning romantic drama of the same name in 1993.

Vannesluoma, a poetry enthusiast, has also composed to other texts, written mainly by women. “All of them have had a linguistic or thematic element that has caught my attention. They are all united by their uncompromising pursuit of passion and desire to challenge prevailing expectations,” Vannesluoma says – and perhaps describes herself as well.