Elsa Nilsson

With her jazz flute, she explores, sens­es, and con­jures up inter­ac­tions and con­nec­tions between soci­ety, peo­ple, and nature. Born in Gothen­burg, she has been cre­at­ing holis­tic, process-ori­ent­ed, and exper­i­men­tal projects for years with a net­work that has grown over the years, includ­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions with Jon Cowherd, Chris Mor­ris­sey, Karl Berg­er, Robert Dick, Jamie Baum, Jes­si­ca Lurie, Rodri­go Recabar­ren, Mar­ty Ken­ney, San­ti­a­go Leib­son, Mark Fer­ber, Sebas­t­ian Noelle, Tina Ray­mond, Emma Day­huff, the CMS Impro­vis­ers Orches­tra, Vin­ny Golia, Brad Shep­ik, Jovi­no San­tos Neto, Chuck Dear­dorf, Jim Knapp, Dawn Clement, and Bill Frisell.

Audi­ences love Elsa Nilsson’s sound archi­tec­ture, her trans­paren­cy, and her authen­tic way of giv­ing mean­ing to sound as it is created.

Her solo releas­es include Atlas Of Sound—Coast Red­woods (2022), Dark Is Light Is (2021), Hind­sight (2020), After Us (2018), and Salt Wind (2017). Dur­ing her time with the renowned Ethe­sis Quar­tet, Elsa and her fel­low musi­cians received effu­sive praise from Jazz­Iz and All About Jazz. The for­mer praised their sound as “a jazz mul­ti­verse that allows them to do every­thing every­where at once … [and] leaves lis­ten­ers hap­pi­ly exhaust­ed at the end of the last cym­bal crash.”

Elsa Nils­son won the Nation­al Flute Association’s 2018 Jazz Flute Com­pe­ti­tion and has received sev­er­al grants from Cham­ber Music Amer­i­ca, includ­ing a 2022 New Jazz Works grant for Band of Pulses

Elsa Nils­son has been a pro­fes­sor of rhythm analy­sis and social­ly engaged art at the New School for Jazz and Con­tem­po­rary Music and has led mas­ter class­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Madi­son, Kansas Uni­ver­si­ty, CCM, the Cincin­nati Pub­lic Schools Jazz Acad­e­my, Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, and the Ann Arbor Arts Clin­ic. Next year, she will release anoth­er album titled LIMINAL..