Jan Johansson was born on the 16th of September 1931 in Söderhamn,
Sweden, and began to play the piano at age 11. He moved to Gothenburg,
Sweden to study electro engineering. It was during this period he met
Stan Getz, who was living in Copenhagen, Denmark at the time. It didn't
take long until Jan had to end his studies to move to Copenhagen to
play with Getz. Jan played with a lot of different American jazz
greats, and was the first European ever to join "Jazz at the
Philharmonic". In 1957 he married his wife Else. In 1961-68 he lived in
Stockholm, where he was very productive. He recorded about 20 records
under his own name, wrote music for the Swedish Radio and TV (the Pippi
Longstocking theme music, for example) and had two sons, Jens and
Anders who both have become world wide known musicians themselves. Some
of the more famous records are: Jazz på svenska ("Jazz in Swedish"),
which has sold platinum many times over, Jazz på ryska ("Jazz in
Russian"), Musik genom fyra sekler ("Music through four centuries"), 8
bitar Johansson ("8 pieces Johansson") and Innertrio. Jan was honoured
with a lot of gold records, Grammies and other awards. On November 9th
1968 Jan Johansson was killed in a car crash on his way to a church
concert in Jönköping, Sweden. After all these years since his death he
is still the best selling and most well respected jazz piano player in
Scandinavia.
