Lisa Ullén

Lisa Ullén is a Swedish pianist and composer, born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the north of Sweden. Based in Stockholm, she studied classical piano at the Royal College of Music before turning increasingly towards improvisation, free jazz, contemporary composition and experimental music in the late 1990s. Her playing combines an acute sensitivity to tonal colour with an interest in the piano's physical, percussive and resonant possibilities.

Her work moves between solo performance and collaborations with musicians, dancers and interdisciplinary artists. She has worked with bassist Nina de Heney and cellist Okkyung Lee, and has participated in larger ensembles including Anna Högberg Attack! and her own Motståndsorkestern. Her 2018 triple album Piano Works brought together a broad range of solo-piano explorations; in the same year, Swedish Radio awarded her its Jazz Composer of the Year prize. She also performs with the improvising trio SPACE.

On Creative Sources, Ullén appears on Lisboa (CS232), an electroacoustic quintet recording with Ernesto Rodrigues, Guilherme Rodrigues, d'incise and Cyril Bondi; Into The Staring Town (CS323), a duo with double bassist Torsten Müller recorded at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival; and with friends (CS727), a collaborative Rekon recording in which she plays electric piano. These three settings reveal different aspects of her approach to attentive interplay, timbral nuance and collective improvisation.