Santiago Quintans doesn’t play the guitar so much as reimagine what it can be. With roots in jazz and an ear tuned to the avant-garde, his music unfolds like an open question — raw, lyrical, sometimes haunted. Guitar Hero, his acclaimed record praised by France Musique and awarded a Choc Classica, offers a portrait of the instrument as a living, breathing entity: unruly, poetic, gloriously unpredictable.

A native of Spain who landed in Paris via Miami, Quintans has built a career that refuses the expected arc. He’s performed with the likes of Riccardo Del Fra, Tony Malaby, Ramon Lopez, and Daniel Humair, and just as comfortably inhabits the acoustic rigor of Steve Reich’s music — to which he brings an improviser’s instinct and a composer’s precision.

His recent work stretches across genre and form. Future Folk merges folk textures with experimental sensibilities, and was featured in a live broadcast on À l’Improviste (France Musique). In 2024, he released Kiss the Joy on Yolk Records — a shimmering blend of songwriting, abstraction, and sonic vulnerability.
Quintans moves just as fluently in the world of contemporary music, having premiered José Manuel López López’s Angle Mort at the Ensemble(s) Festival (broadcast by Radio France). On stage, he favors intimacy and risk, performing in Parisian venues like La Gare, Sunset, Son de la Terre, and 38 Riv.

He also teaches — not just notes, but a way of thinking about sound. Since 2015, he’s been a professor at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMD), while continuing to give masterclasses across Europe and Latin America. At the Contemplay Festival in Vilnius, he delivered Making in Real Time, a conference as much about philosophy as performance.

His music doesn’t settle. It searches — for texture, silence, meaning — and finds, in each sound, the thrill of invention.