Bo Gustav Stenson, better known as Bobo Stenson, was born in 1944, in Sweden. He began studying classical piano at the home of Werner Wolf Glaser but soon switched to jazz. He began performing on the Stockholm jazz scene in 1963. He was particularly active during the 1970s, playing with Rena Rama and participating in a trio with Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen. In the 1980s, Stenson began to focus on his trio with Swedish double-bass player Anders Jormin and drummer Rhune Carlsson. Stenson's profile began to rise when he began collaborating with the American saxophonist Charles Lloyd. While touring with Lloyd in the United States and Europe the group recorded five ECM albums including Fish Out of Water (1990), Notes From Big Sur (1992), The Call (1993), All My Relations (1995) and Canto (1997). The JazzTimes described Stenson as, "the greatest living jazz pianist born outside the United States. He is a poet of the first order. Stenson's spontaneous melodic and harmonic discoveries, his trajectories and distant departures, arrive at a breakthrough to lyricism that, once found, sounds like it has always been there."
In 2005 Stenson received the Swedish royal medal Litteris et Artibus, awarded for important contributions to culture, especially music, dramatic art and literature and he was also the European Jazz Prize, Musician of the Year, in 2006. In 2008 the Bobo Stenson Trio released the album Cantando recorded with Jon Fält on drums. Cantando received the Swedish award for best jazz music in 2009. The three musicians followed with the album Indicum, recorded in Lugano in December 2011. Indicum was awarded the Manifest Prize, received a Grammy nomination and won the OrkesterJournalen Golden Disk. “It's music that we like, says Stenson, we have something, and we made something, and if we like it and if it fits with the way we are playing without disrupting the originality too much, that's what we're looking for. We're an improvising group, we use material and go out from there. Some material we stick to more, and some we have more freedom.”
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator