Jacob Karlzon

Jacob Karlzon is an award-winning Swedish jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader. His style cuts across post-bop and vanguard jazz to embrace lyrical forms of improvisation while wedding traditional forms of folk and classical music to ambient, rock, metal, and electronic music. His exploratory aesthetic was showcased on 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 in Europe. Karlzon refers to his style as "technorganic," balancing open ideas in a genre-crossing approach harmonically, texturally, and tonally. In 2016, he released Now, his Warner Bros. debut, following it with the classical crossover Open Waters in 2019. 2021's Wanderlust featured his trio, electronics, and guest spots from guitarist Dominic Miller and bassist Mathias Eick. The solo Winter Stories appeared in 2024.