His third album release of 1995,
The Land Of Heroes
was
Jorma Kaukonen
's first new solo studio album in a decade. In the meantime, he had been part of reunions of
Jefferson Airplane
and
Hot Tuna
, but
was in the tradition of
Quah
,
Jorma
, and
Too Hot To Handle
, mostly acoustic collections that combined new originals (vocal tunes and instrumentals) with remakes of older originals and covers of songs from the standard folk-blues repertoire.
Kaukonen
has largely shied away from doing solo work in his career, and even here he worked closely with
Michael Falzarano
, who co-produced, played guitar and mandolin, and had writing credits on three songs. The one new
song with lyrics,
"From The Land Of Heroes,"
was a moving tribute to his Finnish ancestors, making you wish that he would spend more time writing, even though it was nice to hear
Airplane
remakes like "Trial By Fire" and blues songs by the
Reverend Gary Davis
. The
Falzarano
material was pedestrian, however. ~ William Ruhlmann