About this artist
Jacob Karlzon is an award-winning Swedish jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader. His playing style cuts across post-bop and vanguard jazz to embrace lyrical forms of improvisation, wedding traditional forms of folk and classical music to ambient, pop, rock, metal, and electronic musics. His attitude toward exploration was showcased on early piano trio outings such as 1996′s Take Your Time!, 1998′s Going Places, and 2002′s Today. His debut quintet set, Big 5, and 2008′s solo outing Improvisational Three (Piano Improvisations Inspired by Maurice Ravel), established his reputation as a genre-crossing innovator on the European continent. Karlzon refers to his style as ’“technorganic,” balancing open ideas in a genre-crossing approach, harmonically, texturally, and tonally.
He has recorded and played extensively with vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy and jazz musicians ranging from Norma Winstone to Benjamin Koppel. After Karlzon’s 2009 quintet outing Heat, he was named Swedish Jazz Musician of the Year in 2010. In 2011 and 2012 he returned to exploratory trios on The Big Picture and More. In 2013 he was a co-billed guest with drummer Peter Johannesson, guitarist Max Schultz, and bassist Dan Berglund on the seminal Cause and Effect. He and Tolstoy delivered the widely heralded duo set A Moment of Now the same year. After signing to Warner International, he issued 2016′s Now leading an acoustic trio, then composed and issued the digital-only solo electro-acoustic offering Relaxing Gaming Music: After Game in 2018. He wed these approaches for his acclaimed, best-selling trio outing Open Waters in 2019. ~ Thom Jurek