Outi Tarkiainen writes of her new release with the Norrbotten Big Band: "During my year as composer in residence with the Norrbotten Big Band in 2017, I wrote eight compositions that strongly capture my voice as a composer while at the same time focusing from many angles - maybe some of them surprising - on this immensely adaptable jazz orchestra. I decided to call the set Unpainted Portraits, my aim being to paint musical portraits of people and prospects past, present and future. Literature, and especially poetry, has always been a source of inspiration for me in my work, and many of my new portraits are dedicated to writers I admire: the early 20th-century English modernist Virginia Woolf, the Finnish visionary playwright Minna Canth, and the contemporary Sámi poetess Rauni Magga Lukkari now living in Tromsø, Norway.

Based in Luleå, Sweden, a town roughly 160 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, the Norrbotten Big Band (NBB) is living proof that jazz is truly a universal music with a remarkable ability to transcend geographical boundaries and cultural differences in its diffusion and appeal.
In this unlikely setting, a vast Nordic region where the nomadic Sami people have been tending their reindeer herds for centuries, the NBB - which since 1996 has been under the artistic direction of the imaginative American trumpeter and composer Tim Hagans - has established itself as Sweden’s representative within the ranks of European ensembles like Germany’s WDR Big Band that have adapted the classic American jazz big band tradition of the Swing and Post-War eras…