Fredrik Carlquist - clarinet & saxophone
“Carlquist is an excellent Stan Getz-inspired player”
Scott Yanow – Los Angeles Jazz Scene
“Fascinating solo lines from saxophonist Carlquist who plays in a soft focus manner that recalls Zoot Sims and Lester Young at times”
Derek Ansell – Jazz Journal, UK
Swedish saxophonist/clarinetist Fredrik Carlquist residents in Barcelona, Spain since 2001. Born into a Swedish/Estonian family in 1969 his musical journey began at early age playing piano with his grandmother. At the age of nine he picked up the clarinet and he started to play alto saxophone one year later and eventually switched to tenor saxophone at the age of 19. Fredrik discovered jazz through the raspy old LP-records at the public library in his birth town Jönköping in south of Sweden in the mid 80’s and deeply taken by the vibrations of these recordings made decades earlier he decided that he would become a jazz musician.
Over the years Fredrik has proved to be able to move over the whole jazz spectra but still remain his own distinctive voice in a somewhat unique way. He has performed and recorded music that uses stylistic elements from the early traditional jazz up to modern improvised music. His familiarity with the jazz tradition made him an appreciated interpreter of the great American songbook but he also proves himself as an inventive composer and arranger with thirteen albums as a leader and more than twenty albums as a sideman. He is a “Jazz In Sweden” award winner of 1997 and he made his record debut as a leader in 1999 on Swedish jazz label Dragon.
In 2007 Fredrik released his first self-produced CD and since then he has produced more than fifteen albums under his own name as well as others. The styles varies from Jazz to Americana, Blues, Ragtime and Bossa Nova often blending styles and musicians with different musical backgrounds within the same album. His albums has earned much attention for their natural and warm sound. His latest release “Clarinet For Dreamers”, for instance, features Fredrik with a string quartet and world-music percussionist Jarrod Cagwin among others.
Fredrik has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Malmö College of Music. He has worked as an arranger at Swedish National TV and he works regularly as an arranger for among others the Sant Andreu Jazz Band from Barcelona. He is an appreciated clarinet and saxophone teacher and he taught at Skurup’s School of Music in Sweden and the international jazz-seminar in Benacassim in Spain among other places. He has performed in whole Europa, USA, South America, Africa and China and he played at prestigious venues like the Carnegie Hall and Village Vanguard in New York, the World Exhibition in Hannover and the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona.