Hatka performed at Telakka Jazz on the first Friday night of January 2025. The following Sunday the trio visited the studio to record a session - music captured in the festival afterglow, fuelled by a shared commitment to free expression.
The album is titled Quartet for a reason. A fourth voice, saxophonist Jone Takamäki, was originally meant to join the group for both the live performance and the studio recording. Quartet is what was planned and what remains. Jone couldn’t make it, so he never played under the name Hatka. His absence became especially poignant after his passing in summer 2025, and Quartet inevitably became a memory piece: a way to honour a deeply valued fellow musician, his sound, and his life.

Hatka is a transatlantic free-jazz trio where three seasoned improvisers operate as one listening organism: Darin Gray (upright bass, preparations, electronics), Janne Tuomi (drums, percussion), and Alan Wilkinson (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, voice). Their music lives in the fertile overlap of free jazz, electro-acoustic texture, and raw improvisation. Physical and spacious at the same time. Rather than “soloist + rhythm section,” Hatka works as a constantly shifting balance of equals: shaping resonance, friction, silence, and sudden momentum in real time. The result is intense, playful, and unafraid of noise, abrupt beauty, or the unknown.