Harri Ala-Kojola

Harri Ala-Kojola — Finnish drummer — is part of the band accompanying Tarja Turunen in her solo career. Drumming in this repertoire needs an uncommon breadth. Tarja has recorded everything from heavy symphonic metal — The Shadow Self (2016), In the Raw (2019) — to records of song with orchestra, classical repertoire and Christmas albums. The same band performs that material, which requires moving between full sticks and brushes, between metal time-keeping and chamber accompaniment. It is an unusual context in metal, where most drummers work within a single vocabulary for a whole career. Here the demand is constant adaptation to what each project asks for. Tarja is Nightwish's original singer, the band that helped create symphonic metal as a genre, and her solo career — begun in 2006, after leaving in 2005 — now has more records than her Nightwish phase. The band accompanying her through that period is a constitutive part of the work.