Martti Edward Vesala (1945-1999) was a well-known Finnish jazzdrummer, composer and groupleader. Vesala is seen as one of the most important agents of the modern jazz and also as the most famous Finnish jazzmusician abroad.

Vesala started his music career as a dancemusician but got accepted to Sibelius Academy in the middle of 1960s to study music theory and percussions. At the same time he started to co-operate with several jazzmodernists and their bands such as Eero Koivistoinen Trio and Paroni Paakkunainen Quartet. In the late 1960s Vesala performed a lot also with rock bands, i.a. Apollo and Soulset but soon the interest in the free expression of freejazz grew bigger for the young drummer. Besides Paakkunainen, one important musical partner for Vesala on the field of free jazz was saxophonist Juhani Aaltonen.

The international career of Vesala began in the beginning of 1970s with a joint concert and recording with two Norwegian musicians, saxophonist Jan Garbarek and bassist Atlid Andersen. This trio fascinated the young audience with their fresh and incredible performances that later played an important role also in the famous band of Vesala, Sound & Fury.

In the late-1970s Vesala influenced internationally most actively in the quartet of Polish trumpetist Tomasz Stanko, but he also co-operated with many top jazzmusicians of that time, i.a. Paul Bley, Chick Corea, Archie Shepp and Gary Burton. The climax of the decade for Vesala was the album Heavy Life, released in 1980, with the top American jazzmusicians.

Vesala had rare charismatic creativity and ability to conduct the orchestra. He could be extremely uncompromising with his art and asked many of his virtosic fellow musicians to forget all they had ever learned and play for their lives. Vesala's music is really emotional: it has a great melodic leadthought and great visionarity.

In the end of his career Vesala got familiar with the modern concertmusic field as well, but retreated to the country side from the music environment in the late-1990s. The death of Vesala came however as a suprise for the audience. In his last years he had been recording with saxophonist Kari Heinilä and a significant comeback concert of Sound & Fury was planned to happen in the close future as well.