The time of rigid demarcations between musical genres is over. For those who see music, indeed who love music as a universal language offering unlimited scope for human expression, this can only be a positive development. When one considers the jazz pianists of our time, they have just about all received their grounding in classical music, and yet these are musicians who don’t just traverse many different jazz styles, they can also roam at will into other genres. And looking among them, it would be hard to find a pianist as quintessentially complete as Iiro Rantala from Finland.The 49-year-old, who first studied jazz piano at Finland`s reknown Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and then classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, has always shown a tendency to regard the entire history of music as a treasure trove
