“Jussi Reijonen has an almost mystical connection to his instruments... Between resonances, overtones, and pauses, a music emerges that tells of human experiences – of inner movement, of the flow of thoughts, of the search for harmony. ‘sayr: salt | thirst’ is an album of rare poetic power.”
—Jacek Brun, JazzFun.de (Germany)

“To listen to this record is to hear an entire atlas of musical voices... This is not quotation or pastiche — it is absorption. ‘sayr: salt | thirst’ is less an album than a statement of artistic identity: uncompromising, borderless, and profoundly human.”
—Thierry De Clemensat, PARIS MOVE (France)

★★★★★
—Matti Komulainen, HIFIMAAILMA (Finland)

★★★★
—Guido Michelone, Il Manifesto (Italy)

With sayr: salt | thirst, the first release in his new series of 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 work Three Seconds | Kolme Toista.

sayr is an exploration of the small, the simple and the sparse; the rugged earthy; the gnarly unpretty; and most of all, of memories of roots and branches; of bare feet in soil; and of paths less – or differently – predetermined.

Rooted in a metaphorical reframing of the concept of “sayr” as found in Arabic music — a musical pathway or unfolding, literally “course” or “motion” —, this solo improvisation becomes a spontaneous exploration through an acoustemological memory palace: a pathway of memory recalled and reimagined through music.

Using a set of pre-composed musical gestures as loci or touchstones — like rooms in a memory palace — Reijonen navigates freely between them through improvisation. Each gestural locus becomes a portal, awakening acoustemological imagines shaped by his life across Northern Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, Lebanon, and the United States: mirrored echoes of Frances A. Yates’ “forms, marks, simulacra of what we wish to remember” refracting in reverse in the space between sound and personal experience.

Recorded in one fully improvised take at Reijonen’s home studio on steel-string acoustic guitar one afternoon in March 2025, sayr: salt | thirst 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.