Formatik is an improvised music club in the heart of Kallio. Hosted by Melik Turunen, the club brings together local improvising musicians in new small-group formations, presenting their first musical encounters. Joining Turunen for the club’s third concert are cellist Wilson Tanner-Smith and saxophonist Taneli Viitahuhta.

Wilson Tanner Smith is a cellist, composer, improviser, and theatre artist currently based in Helsinki. His musical sensibility is informed by free improvisation/free jazz, ambient, DIY and found sounds, and by many cross-cultural/-genre collaborations in his former hometown, Chicago, and more recently across northern/western Europe.

Taneli Viitahuhta is an improviser specializing in wind instruments. His musical language draws freely from the practices of free jazz, minimalism, and performance art. In recent years, he has performed acoustic break jazz with the ensemble Fernetti and artist Shubanghi Singh; developed dialogues between cassette recordings and a self-modified flutophone as well as the Chinese hulusi flute; and worked alongside Otto Eskelinen as a musician in the public-space workshops and performances of the performance art collective Toisissa tiloissa.
In live performance, Viitahuhta is particularly drawn to the unpredictability of each situation and the possibility of new encounters. Beyond music, he is a researcher and translator in philosophy and social theory, with an extensive publication record in critical theory. Together with Sezgin Boynik, he co-authored a book on the 1962 World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki and the appearance of the Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet at the festival. His internationally acclaimed book Free Jazz Communism (2020) has recently been translated into Portuguese.