Welcome to My Website!

I am a professional musician living in Helsinki, Finland. I work currently at the West Helsinki Music Institute teaching piano, keyboard harmony, composing, arranging, and music theory.

As a composer, I have gained the most reputation in jazz music. My big band compositions have been played by jazz orchestras around the world. For example, UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra (FI), Norrbotten Big Band (SE), Associazione Blue Note Orchestra (IT), and Daryl McKenzie Jazz Orchestra (AU) have performed my music. Recently I have begun to compose more chamber music in a style of contemporary art music.

​I also work as a freelance pianist and flutist now and then.​

Composer and Arranger

When I compose, I use intuition and technical knowledge in equal measure. Sometimes the compositional ideas can be very intellectual, but the final choice between them always comes from intuition: things that feel good, usually are that too. For me, it is also crucial to try to create as balanced a whole as possible for each work at hand. I also try to form a natural dramatic arc for my compositions without forgetting the meaning of fascinating surprises.

​Thanks to my versatile education, I can draw on ideas and composing techniques from both classical and rhythm music traditions: I can compose and arrange equally for jazz, symphony and wind orchestras, chamber music ensembles, and for solo instruments.​

Listen to my music:

Music Educator

The most important thing to me in teaching, is having straight personal contact with my students. To achieve this, I consciously try to lower my authority level to a level that allows equal communication between me and my students. That's one of the reasons why I give my students a lot of freedom in piano lessons – especially when choosing the repertuare. If the song is chosen or even composed by the student, he usually practices it much more enthusiastically than the song assigned by the teacher.

In the music lessons, you learn many things besides playing: concentration, fidelity, tolerance of failure, and performing. For some students, the music lesson also have a therapeutic meaning. A weekly one-on-one meeting with the teacher may be vital to them. In that case, teaching music starts to be very near youth work.
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