Edito de Backwoods Bells 2Born in Finland Ari moved to Northern Canada at an early age. Growing up in an isolated mining community, Ari took up guitar to fight off the boredom of teenage years in the north. This lack of exposure to other musicians led to Ari developing a unique and versatile guitar style. Ari began his musical career as a guitarist for a tent revival faith healer. He later moved on to become a session guitarist in Winnipeg, Manitoba during the late seventies and early eighties. Ari's fingerwork was heard on hundreds of sessions for a variety of musical projects as well as filmwork and jingle recordings. During that time Ari performed live with groups like, Brotherlove, Dega ( featuring Steve Bell ), Rhonda Hart, Byron O'Donnell, and Joey Gregorish. In the mid-eighties Ari relocated to Ontario and began releasing solo guitar projects. Since then Ari has performed with Bobby Vinton, Frankie Laine, Pinetop Perkins, and Paul Shaffer among others. Performance highlights have been opening for Stevie Ray Vaughn, Hank Williams Jr., and the Allman Brothers, at the Beaver Dam Lake Festival outside of Neepawa, Manitoba. Ari was also part of the opening act for Bob Dylan at the Fort William Gardens in Thunder Bay during Dylan's '93 tour. In 1992 TVO produced a half hour program on Ari's performance at "The Top of the Senator" in Toronto, Ontario. The program was broadcast nationally on the Vision Network. At the turn of the century Ari became one of Canada's top downloaded guitarists on MP3.com, receiving over 150,000 plays of his music prior to MP3.com changing its format and ownership. The latest cd from Ari Lahdekorpi, entitled "A Matter of Record" was recorded over the course of the winter of '05. The disc is a collaboration with Paul Hessey, a masterful jazz drummer, who provided Ari with drums tracks to work from. The project comes on the heels of Ari's work on a feature length National Film Board film that has been released internationally, entitled "Letters from Karelia".