On The Floor! - Live at Cargo feat Kabu Kabu

Jimi Tenor

Sahko, PUU, Helsinki

Musician and composer Jimi Tenor has never settled for the traditional role of a pop artist. He is known as a productive musician whose work lies beyond current trends, and also combines the finest elements of Afro-American music, spontaneous silliness and shameless glamour in an original way. Besides being a professional musician for almost 20 years, Jimi Tenor has also practised photography, directed short films and designed clothes and musical instruments. Tenor's music, along with his design and technical innovations, springs from experimental rock. His first recording band Jimi Tenor & His Shamans was influenced by early '80s industrial, where instruments were made out of scrap metal and plastic. Later during the '90s Tenor moved first towards electronic music, but soon got closer to his roots: '60s and '70s jazz, psychedelic soul and African funk. Although Tenor spent all of the '90s in Berlin, New York, London and Barcelona, his artistic approach was typically Finnish: technically practical, but saturated with black humour and a national romantic tone. So he was quite at home all over Europe in front of a crowd gone wild, wearing a glittering self-designed costume and a flowing cape, holding a noise-producing device the main components of which were a walkman made in Hong Kong and an East-German bicycle dynamo, performing a song about ancient Finnish forest gods, sounding like a mixture of Gil Evans, Jimi Hendrix and Fela Kuti. Today Jimi Tenor is an established European artist who operates outside the mainstream. His audience consists of clubbers and alternative rock enthusiasts looking for new perspective, but also of jazz and funk rebels. Those who understand that even unconventional pop music can move your body and heart.