If you ask me how to distinguish a great band from all the quite good ones, my answer would be to just listen to any given group live for three nights in a row. See if you still think they sound fresh for your ears during the encore of the third show. Timo Lassy Band does. One music journalist called the “In With Lassy” release club nights a “mini festival”. That works, sure. There were some great opening acts, proving that there's a future for jazz in Finland, some topical guests at our talk show, and a lot of people who make all this worthwhile. All of the gigs sold out in advance. Damn, somebody even bought the entire Lassy back catalogue on vinyl all at once from the record stand. That's dedication.

Matti Nives

The Dubrovnik gigs have been recorded using the legendary Nagra IV-S recording system and the equally iconic Bang & Olufsen BM5 stereo microphones. The Nagra dates back to the 1970's and the B&O's to somewhere around the 1960's. It's a very simple setup. The Nagra system was invented by the Polish Stefan Kudelski and the word “Nagra” itself means “to record”. Due to its compacts size, it has been used for capturing countless of live shows. Perhaps the most important thing here was the fact that the band not to mention Timo himself, was not informed of the planned recording. The whole idea was completely ex tempore. So there was no pressure on the performance. The gigs were live mixed by Ilari Larjosto, who also assisted in the recording process. His way of changing tapes on the go was very smooth indeed. That's the downside of using the Nagra: you can only tape something like 30 minutes of music on one go, depending on the recording speed. As this was a very spontaneous effort, we didn't have too many new tapes at hand. Thus, we had to re-use some older tapes. Maybe you can here some crackling here and there because of this if you listen carefully. Still, these tapes capture the mood and the ambience of those three nights quite well. I credit some of it to the method of recording described above, of course to the band, and also to the wonderful audience you can hear reacting to the music here.