Monica Zetterlund

Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund (1937-2005) was born in the small town of Hagfors. Her father led a local band and played saxophone and accordion, and Zetterlund’s earliest professional experience was in this group. In 1957, she was invited by Danish bandleader Ib Glindemann to sit in with his big band at a concert in Hagfors, and he was sufficiently impressed to ask here to join the band in Copenhagen. By 1958 she was back in Sweden, having married and become a mother. She began to attract attention in the Stockholm jazz scene, recording her debut album Swedish Sensation with saxophonist Arne Domnerus in a band that included Bengt Hallberg, Bjarne Nerem, Åke Persson and guest Americans, Benny Bailey and Donald Byrd. Initially influenced by Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, on record she has more of the ‘cool’ sound of Anita O’Day or June Christy, which was very popular in the 1950s. Her late 1950s recordings with Glindemann and Domnerus were mostly made in English, but a 1959 EP featured Swedish translations of four songs from the musical ‘My Fair Lady’.

In 1960, Zetterlund recorded an album with baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin. A 1962 album with a badly-punning title Ahh! Monica! kicked off with a Swedish version of ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ retitled ‘Sakta Vi Gå Genom Stan’, which has become her best known song in Sweden, as a tribute to Stockholm. A less successful song about the city was ‘En gång i Stockholm’ the Swedish entry to the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest, which Zetterlund performed, ignominiously receiving ‘null points’ in a year when Denmark won. The singer bounced back in 1964 with what is widely considered her finest album, Waltz For Debby, with the Bill Evans Trio. She would continue to team up with Evans on his return visits to Sweden into the 1970s.

From 1962, Zetterlund spent more and more time working as an actress, including in the Oscar-nominated ‘The Emigrant’ from 1971 alongside Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. Though she recorded less frequently in the 1970s, a few notable sessions stand out. In 1972, Zetterlund teamed up with Steve Kuhn to record an album of his compositions, though accompaniment comes from the Sveriges Radios Jazzgrupp with Bengt Hallberg on piano. In 1977, she recorded with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Zetterlund paid tribute to Billie Holiday in an album recorded with Horace Parlan and Red Mitchell in 1984, and in the 1990s she made a few more recordings with, among others, Toots Thielemans and Bernt Rosengren. Sadly, she had long suffered from scoliosis following a childhood accident, and by 1999 she made the decision to retire, still in her early sixties. In 2005, she was killed by a fire in her Stockholm apartment.

Key Recordings:
Swedish Sensation (Columbia 1958)
Waltz For Debby (Philips 1964) with Bill Evans
Chicken Feathers (SR 1973)