As the owner of Finland’s Eclipse Music, guitarist, vocalist and composer Tapio Ylinen has released a number of acclaimed albums recorded by a range of jazz and rock artists over the past decade, including his recent rock based singer-songwriter solo album Left Unsaid as well as the album debut of Finnish orchestral prog-rock composer Jukka Iisakkila entitled Clocks And Clouds. In early 2020, Eclipse released Mortality, a full-length CD that skillfully merges jazz with a new brand of progressive fusion music. Being all instrumental, the 50-minute, 8-cut album features the music of Tapio Ylinen performed by a range of contemporary Finnish musicians, including Verneri Pohjola (trumpet), Mika Kallio (drums), Aki Rissanen (keyboards) and other musicians. Interestingly, although a skillful guitarist in his own right, Tapio’s role on Mortality is as the music composer, while leaving the guitar sounds for the most part to Jere Haakana and Teemu Viinikainen. Musically, Mortality creates a stark, harrowing sonic texture that evokes both 1970’s era Finnish prog-rock and a more prototype instrumental jazz that borrows from ECM style sounds. While Tapio is credited as the musical composer, the other players take part in the musical arrangements. The son of the late, great instrumental prog-fusion pioneer Pekka Pohjola, trumpet wiz Verneri Pohjola shines in this musical setting as a player and arranger of several tracks here, and some of the melodies are somehow reminiscent of his late father’s approach to some of his jazzier moments. With titles such as “In Memoriam” (parts 1-3), “Death’s Little Sister” and the title track “Mortality”, the mark of death is apparent, especially as Tapio wrote the music in the wake of his wife’s passing in 2015. The album works as a unified whole piece yet the songs move easily from one to the next. Even with his Left Unsaid album revealing his singer-songwriter tendencies, the 2021 album release of Mortality reveals yet another side to Tapio Ylinen’s compositional genius. Mortality brings Finland’s jazz-fusion legacy up-to-date as we move deeper into the 2020's.