I borrowed Pekka Laine's and Tommi E. Virtanen's book "Suomalaiset sähkökitaristit" ("Finnish Electric Guitarists") from my local public library a couple of weeks ago. The book came out in 2022, but for some reason I had not picked it up before.
The book has more than 560 pages, and consists of nearly 60 interviews with a very wide selection of prominent rock, pop, roots and jazz players. There are also remembrances of a few key people (Albert Järvinen, Petri Walli, Alexi Laiho) who were no longer available for interview. The oldest interviewee was the old-school session player Heikki Laurila (1934-2021), the most recorded guitarist in Finnish music, with more than 7000 tracks in his résumé. The youngest is the heavy metal guitarist Samy Elbanna (born in 1995).
Some of the interviewees have learned to play on their own, but there are also many players, regardless of the genre, who have had formal musical training. The late 1960s British blues boom, Jimi Hendrix (who played a legendary concert in Helsinki in 1967) and especially Albert Järvinen's role in the Hurriganes (the seminal 1970s Finnish rock & roll band) come up as key influences in many of the interviews with the people who started out in the 1960s and 1970s.
While many of the people obviously have their own individual voices, and there are wildly different personal histories, the interviews have been skillfully edited into a fairly compact format, and overall the book is an easy and entertaining read. I've never played guitar beyond of trying to pluck a few random notes, but reading the book, I got a lot of new insights into guitar playing, the role of practising, technical gear, touring, session work and the life of a musician in general.
The book at the publisher web site:
