Olli Soikkeli is from a family of nonmusicians. His parents, however, tried to interest his two older brothers in playing some instruments, but the only result was for a few years “a pretty crappy guitar’ gathering dust in the house. When the 12-year-old Olli showed interest in it, they quickly got teachers for him. He toyed around for a few years until a summer gig at a local restaurant proved inspirational, “For three months I was washing dishes and decided, ‘Okay I have to practice so I don’t have to do this ever again.’”
One influential teacher, Kari Pääkkönen, was a locally famous guitar player. “He had been playing since the 1960s. He was really interested in Gypsy Jazz and was trying to get someone in town to play that music with him. After a while the lessons just turned into learning tunes so I could play rhythm for him in small gigs. He gave me CDs of Django and The Rosenberg Trio, and I really fell in love with the music and stopped listening to anything but Django stuff. It was basically a 24-hour thing; the music was playing all the time in the background, even if I wasn’t practicing. At that time, I was practicing four to eight hours a day. Soon, I was doing shows all over Finland and I decided this is what I wanted to do.”
Naturally, as more people became aware of his talent, travel expanded and he soon found himself performing with visiting Ame
