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Raoul Melvin Björkenheim (born February 11, 1956) is a Finnish-American jazz guitarist, who has lived in Helsinki, New York, and Los Angeles. His mother is Finnish-American actress Taina Elg. In his teens he moved to Finland. He attended the Helsinki Conservatory and the Berklee School of Music.
With a musical career spanning forty years, Raoul Björkenheim explores a rainbow of musical sources through his guitar playing, focusing on projects ranging from a duo with the legendary Juhani Aaltonen to a freejazz nonet featuring four Senegalese drummers.
Raoul Björkenheim is a Finnish-American guitarist and composer who has been creating original music for the past four decades living in New York City and Helsinki, where he is presently based. Describing his on-going work as investigative guitarism, he is best known for an expressionistic and lyrical guitar style.
- A Variety of Aesthetics
- Not Just Making It Up as We Go Along
- Notes, Scales, Sounds and Styles
- The Tools of The Trade
- The Public Saxophone
- To Each His Own
All three are musicians who have collaborated with Bjorkenheim. The monster bassist Laswell is, with Swedish drummer Morgan Agren, part of Blixt, a power trio featuring a steady rhythmic pulse and metalesque aesthetics, with improvisation in the spotlight. Bjorkenheim is busy playing and recording with many line-ups. Scorch – with Norwegian Ingebri...
One challenge in playing improvised music is to maintain a form. With Blixt, Bjorkenheim admits, it sometimes can get a bit jammy. However, in a band with a reference point to rock, that is not necessarily a bad thing. In Blixt, much of the idea is to create massive volume for bigger stages. “I told somebody who had not heard the music before that ...
Raoul Bjorkenheim is a very versatile musician, with a stylistic range that goes from blues, rock and jazz to orchestral music. That can make the picture of him as a musician complex and maybe even hard to grasp. Listening to Bjorkenheim from only one recording or in one particular line-up does not tell the whole story. The common denominator is ho...
Let’s indulge ourselves in gear – The Axes – for a while. A saxophone or a trumpet usually sounds pretty much like you would expect, but when talking about guitars you can never be sure of the basic sound (or even the number of strings, for that matter). While most jazz guitarists traditionally stick to classic semi-hollow or hollow-body arch-top m...
The Guitar Hero number one, Jimi Hendrix, who has meant a lot to Raoul Bjorkenheim, used to end his band introductions with “…and yours truly, on public saxophone”. It seems to be a fact that many of the better jazz guitarists tend to phrase like saxophonists – or wind players. The reason for this is probably that wind players phrase naturally, as ...
Raoul Bjorkenheim could have walked a different path. The guitarist and composer almost started studying photography. He was the 13th of some 150 applicants for studies at the Taideteollinen korkeakoulu (currently Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture). Because only 11 were admitted, today he is a professional musician and an ama...
Mar 8, 2018 · Two legends of Finnish jazz and progressive rock: Juhani Aaltonen (Tasavallan Presidentti etc.) and Raoul Björkenheim (Krakatau, Ecstacy, Triad) in an intimate live recording from the Tampere Jazz Happening 2016
Raoul Melvin Björkenheim is a Finnish-American jazz guitarist, who has lived in Helsinki, New York, and Los Angeles. His mother is Finnish-American actress Taina Elg. In his teens he...
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Raoul Björkenheim, born in L.A. in 1956, belongs to the group of the best jazzguitarists in Finland though he has spent all his life between two continents travelling between Helsinki and New York all the time.
