bio

NIKLAS WINTER
Guitar
Born 1969 Turku, Finland.

”The result is an entirely successful run of fourteen very different tracks that hang together to provide an overall aesthetic that is both meditative and swinging.” Phil Johnson on the Graduale album, London Jazz News, 2023 (UK)

Niklas in a nutshell

Niklas Winter is a jazz guitarist and composer born in Turku, Finland. He has made nine albums as a leader and many more as a co-leader and sideman, having recorded with Kenny Wheeler, Lars Jansson, Henry Lowther, Severi Pyysalo and many others.

Winter studied classical guitar at the Turku Conservatory during 1985-1990 and later, at Berklee College of Music in the mid-’90s.

Collaborations include guitar duos with Jesse Van Ruller, Ulf Wakenius, John Stowell, Søren Lee, Libor Smoldas, Lorenzo Cominoli, Teemu Viinikainen and with vibraphonist Severi Pyysalo and with fluitist Mark Lotz.

Band projects include Niklas Winter Quartet, Winter’s Jazz Workshop and a collaboration with Henry Lowther and the Utopia Chamber Choir in Winter’s Graduale project.

Winter has played concerts with the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in productions with Kiri Te Kanawa and in Mikko Heiniö’s Opera, Erik XIV.

He has performed at the London Jazz Festival, Pori Jazz Festival, Tampere Jazz Festival, Copenhagen and Aarhus Jazz Festivals, Orta and Nuoro Jazz Festivals, Turku Jazz and Turku Music Festival, Viapori Jazz Festival, Katedraali Soi!, Sacred Music Festival, Yokohama Jazz Promenade, Juhla Tokyo Festival, Beijing Contemporary Music Festival and the Bohemia Jazz Fest, to name a few.

Since the year 2000, Winter has also composed music for television documentaries for the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE.

Niklas has been a guitar instructor for some 25 years in Novia and Jyväskylä and Oulu Universities of Applied Sciences until spring 2023. Now he works as a freelancer musician doing concerts and workshops around the globe.

He has led workshops at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Chugye University for The Arts, Aarhus University and at the Beijing Central Conservatory. And naturally in many music schools in Finland.

In 2000, Winter received the Young Arts Award, and in 2001 the Aboa Price by the city of Turku. In 2006 Winter received the Western Cultural Award by Svenska Kulturfonden.

Winter started his jazz record label, Abovoice, in 2000. Today the catalog consists of 19 releases. The label received a Finnish Jazz Grammy in 2003.

Niklas Winter’s newest album ‘Graduale’ was released in 2023. This album consists of original compositions and of arrangements for a jazz quartet and a choir. Melodies are used from the oldest written music in Finland, The Graduale Aboense, a hymnbook that was used in the medieval times at the Turku Cathedral.

In November 2023 Winter performed this material at the Yugenji Temple in Tokyo during the Juhla Tokyo Festival and at the London Jazz Festival in St.Paul’s Church with the London based Eclectic Voices choir. He also gave lectures at the famous Guildhall School of Music and Drama and performed at the famous Union Chappel venue as a part of Stockhausen’s ’Long Tones For Peace’ concert.

In August 2023 Niklas also performed two world premiere’s at the Paraisten Urkupäivät Festival with Austrian church organist Franz Danksagmüller. Infernal Joy by Danksagmüller and Solstice by Winter were presented for a live audience for the first time.

Niklas Winter Quartet, a Swedish – Finnish collaboration, recorded material for a new album in the spring of 2023 that will be released now in the fall of 2024 on Winter’s Abovoice label.

The year 2024 will be an active one for Winter, filled with concerts and new projects and collaborations.

The press wrote even more:

Niklas Winter’s poetic playing shows great knowledge of improvisational skills. Jörgen Östberg /Orkester Journalen (Sweden)

’In Winter’s playing listener can hear plainness and intelligence. Winter’s improvisations and harmonies look back to the history of jazz but also expresses the atmosphere of today.’ Hiroki Sugita/Jazz Life (Japan)

Trust in fact, was key, as was a fundamental sense of good time. Without a drummer or a bassist, and with the two guitarists sometimes dissolving into spare sections where time was, at best, suggested, it became even more essential that the two could internalize that time and know where it was, without it being explicitly there. It’s in the context of the duo that an artist is at his/her most exposed; not only are their abilities, instincts and improvisational élan laid bare, but their communication skills—or lack thereof—are impossible to disguise. Viinikainen and Winter needn’t have worried, as it was clear, from their Tampere Jazz Happening performance, that this was a duo communicating at a very deep level, playing relatively quiet music that was, nevertheless, thoroughly captivating. John Kelman / All About Jazz (USA)

Selected discography

As leader

2023 Graduale

2021 The Lighthouse

2017 Another Way Home

2010 Eight Songs Seven Keys

2008 Beautopia

2006 Live in Stockholm

2002 Piae Cantiones

2001 Saknad

1999 Hypnosis

As co-leader

2018 You

2000 Silent Knowledge

1997 A Night In Bilbao

1994 New Deal

As sideman

2017 Valo by Max de Aloe Baltic Trio

2014 Ostrobothnian Tales by West Yard Jazz Quartet

2000 Answer by Jan Simons Band Feat. Kenny Wheeler

1995 Hägringar by Mecki Knif

1994 Nattfågel by Nilla Hansson, Niklas Winter, Lauri Antila