A Pioneer of the Great European Songbook
Jan Lundgren was born in southern Sweden in 1966. His first serious training began as early as age five, in the form of piano and tennis lessons. He showed particular talent in both fields, and some were convinced that, even as a teenager, he would become the new Adolf Wiklund, while others already considered him a new Björn Borg. It was fortunate for jazz fans that Lundgren ultimately decided to choose music. As might be expected, his first musical explorations were in the area of classical music, but once he discovered jazz-rather accidentally and much later-he found this new world to be just what he liked and what he really wanted to immerse himself in.
He studied at theMalmö Academy of Music, a renowned school, when he was 20 years old. According to a story that often circulates, he was accepted with the condition that he would also play the role of pianist in the well-known Monday Night Big Band. He soon began playing with the best jazz musicians in Sweden, from his mentor Arne Domnerus to Putte Wickman and Bernt Rosengren. But he also traveled regularly to the United States from the beginning (and continues to do so today) to work with legends such as Benny Golson and Johnny Griffin. Thanks to his extraordinary technique and classical training, Lundgren quickly acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the American jazz piano tradition, quickly becoming proficient in all styles from early jazz to modern jazz. And all this was put to use as raw material to create their own music, as it soon appeared.
Lundgren’s recording debut, the acclaimed album “Conclusion,” was released in Sweden in 1994, and a year later he founded his own trio with fellow students Mattias Svensson on double bass and Rasmus Kihlberg on drums (since 2000 the drummer has been Denmark’s Morten Lund, and since 2007 it has been Hungary’s Zoltan Csörsz). The trio did not have to wait long for a big hit: the album “Swedish Standards,” released in 1997, became a best-seller and its success proved to be long-lasting. The album entered the Swedish pop charts and, with a new release in 2009, became something of a standard in its own right. Six more award-winning and commercially successful albums with this lineup followed in the years up to 2003. The trio’s intense touring activities culminated in a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall in June 2000. This was part of the “Swedish Jazz Salutes the USA” event; it made Lundgren the first Scandinavian jazz pianist to play in this history-laden hall.
As befits a hard worker like him, Lundgren always has other projects going on that he devotes himself to wholeheartedly. To date, Lundgren has recorded more than 50 albums under his own name or as a co-leader for high-profile labels (from 2005 to 2009, and again since 2014 he has recorded exclusively for ACT), plus dozens more as an accompanist. He has worked with almost all of Sweden’s leading musicians and with numerous international jazz musicians such as Mark Murphy, Harry Allen, Lee Konitz, and Stacey Kent. He has also produced several CDs. In 2010, Lundgren founded the “Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival” in the southern Swedish city where he has lived since 2005 and which is world-renowned as the setting for Henning Mankell‘s TV detective series Wallander. The “Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival” has quickly become one of the most important jazz festivals in Europe. Lundgren maintains strong ties to the festival as artistic director.
As a pianist and composer, Lundgren was one of the pioneers in the process of emancipating European jazz from American jazz, and he set the direction for the generations that followed him. His playing combines several elements: virtuosity, sound shaping and an awareness of form typical of European classical music; a conscious memory of his folk music traditions; the canon of American jazz; and the unbridled joy of improvisation. This makes him an ideal person for all kinds of music-making across genres, and the list of his activities is impressive. Includes work with classical trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger to create an exciting combination of modern classical and free music. There was also an interdisciplinary experiment with Swedish writer Jacques Werup. Lundgren focused on sacred music of the Renaissance with double bassist Lars Danielsson and the Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir in “Magnum Mysterium.” There was a tribute to pianist Jan Johansson, who passed away too young. Johansson was a pioneer who combined jazz and Swedish folklore into a specific “Nordic sound” and is thus a recognized and direct model for Lundgren. This was recorded and released as “The Ystad Concert – A Tribute to Jan Johansson” in 2016. Lundgren has also been involved in centennial tributes to the great musical multifaceted Leonard Bernstein in major European concert halls.
In a sense, the project that defines the essence of Lundgren’s activity is the trio “Mare Nostrum.” One critic called it “Europe’s first supergroup,” and there is some truth in that. Lundgren’s way of making music is to be stylistically versatile and adaptable, to create space for things to happen, and always to be melodic. In this approach, he ideally complements the Mediterranean sound worlds of Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and French accordionist Richard Galliano. This peer collective’s debut album, released in 2007, sold more than 50,000 copies and became a big hit in the jazz context. Since that first release, there have been two more albums by the trio, each recorded in a different country of origin of one of the three musicians. The latest, “Mare Nostrum 3,” was released in January 2019. The three albums constitute a brilliant trilogy of these great poets of music. Together they redefined the concept of European jazz. It is a project through which Jan Lundgren has strengthened his profile and relevance: he is in fact one of the co-founders of a “Great European Songbook.”
Jan Lundgren has been featured in his own concert series at Stockholm Concert Hall since 2019, titled “Kind of Jazz.” Since 2022, Jan Lundgren has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
