ACT has signed an exclusive artist contract with saxophonist Jukka Perko. He will appear as a sideman on the new album Kind Of Cool by German drummer-bandleader Wolfgang Haffner (release January 30th). In April 2015 ACT will release Perko’s first album as a co-leader – the duo recording It Takes Two To Tango with pianist Iiro Rantala.

Born in 1968, Jukka Perko was hired on to the “Dizzy Gillespie 70th Anniversary Big Band” at the age of 20, with which he toured intensively through Europe and the USA. That was followed by collaborations with bebop and hardbop greats the likes of Red Rodney and McCoy Tyner and Scandinavian icons like Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.

Like Iiro Rantala, Perko also has roots in occidental artistic music as well as in jazz, and he plays regularly with classical orchestras. These two aspects - the American jazz roots and the European classic and folklore - are reflected to this day  in his music and compositions on nine albums. It Takes Two To Tango is the first joint recording of the two, in a lyrically dense discourse on the topic of love in all its facets. It is an homage to their musical homeland and the uniting power of jazz.

On December 10 Jukka Perko will perform with Wolfgang Haffner at the Berlin Philharmonic. Read more about the event here.