Patrik Henriksson

Patrik Henriksson is a Swedish composer and musician based in Gothenburg, originally from Kiruna, a small mining town far above the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. Growing up among the long winters, vast distances and relative isolation of northern Sweden became part of his outlook on life and, he believes, also part of the music he would eventually come to write.

His first serious encounter with music came through the classical guitar. At around sixteen, hearing Swedish guitarist Göran Söllscher play Bach made a profound impression, and two years later Henriksson left Kiruna to study music in Kalix. He practised intensively, with the classical guitar at the centre of his musical life.

It was during those years that he also encountered jazz more directly. In the mid-1980s, he heard the young Esbjörn Svensson performing with Fredrik Norén's band in Kalix — long before Svensson became internationally known with E.S.T. Henriksson would return to Svensson's music many years later, and that connection eventually found its way onto Göteborg–Gothenburg: One Way Ticket in the composition Thanks Esbjörn.

But Henriksson's own path through music was interrupted early. A finger on his left hand gradually stopped responding as it should. For a classical guitarist, the problem eventually made playing impossible. He turned to the piano and continued composing for some years, but in his late twenties he stopped making music altogether.

More than twenty-five years passed.

Only around thirty years after the first symptoms appeared did Henriksson, after encountering the story of another musician with similar problems, discover a name for what had happened to his hand: focal dystonia. The discovery did not provide a simple solution, but it gave him a way of understanding the problem. He began a long process of retraining movements and exploring new ways for the hand and nervous system to work together — a process that continues today.

At the same time, music gradually returned.

That return eventually became Göteborg–Gothenburg: One Way Ticket, an album of original compositions featuring Morgan Ågren on drums, Stefan Pettersson on bass and Mikael Karlsson on saxophone.

Henriksson's music is difficult to place within a single tradition. Contemporary jazz and fusion meet a background in classical music and composition, but there are other traces as well: the northern landscape in which he grew up, the music he encountered as a young man, and perhaps even the long years in which music was largely absent from his life.

His compositions often begin with something small — a harmonic idea, a memory, a person, an unexpected chord or an image — and develop into music where carefully shaped composition and improvisation can coexist. Melancholy and exuberance, seriousness and playfulness are rarely very far apart.

Göteborg–Gothenburg: One Way Ticket is therefore more than a return after a long interruption. It is music made from the accumulation of very different parts of a life — from Kiruna to Gothenburg, from Mozart to modern jazz, and from losing the ability to play to finding another way into music.