Selim Rantapuro - Jazz Guitarist, Composer and Educator

About me

Selim Rantapuro is a Finnish jazz guitarist and educator. He started his career as a freelance musician and studied in Helsinki Pop & Jazz Conservatory where he graduated in 2015. After that, his passion for jazz led him to study in The Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in The Netherlands, where he obtained his bachelor degree in 2019. He got to study with some Dutch jazz greats including John Ruocco, Jarmo Hoogendijk, Erik Ineke, Niels Tausk, Jens Larsen, Martijn van Iterson, Wim Bronnenberg and Juraj Stanik just to just to name a few. After living in The Netherlands for some, he decided to study in The Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp in Belgium. He attended to classes by Nic Thys, Teun Verbruggen, Ben Slujis, Hendrik Braeckman and Frederik Leroux-Roels just to name some, and obtained there his master’s degree in jazz performance in 2022. and  His experiences living in abroad gave him a lot of artistic inspiration. 

Jazzwise his playing style is a mix of traditional jazz language but he is also open to modern ways of expressing himself. He eagerly composes his own music that is personal and modern, but that also has some hardbop and postbop influences, including jazz artists such as Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter just to name a few.