Rolf Ericson

Duke Ellington: Copenhagen 1964

Read "Copenhagen 1964" reviewed by Jack Kenny

by Jack Kenny
March 3, 2026

All Duke Ellington concerts offered music of substance. Audiences listened patiently through the medleys and Tony Watkins' vocals. Some performances, however, stood apart because they contained material that was fresh--music not yet worn thin by repetition, where both the thinking and playing could still surprise. Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and the orchestra toured Asia (the “Far East") in 1963. Rather than immediately writing new compositions, they deliberately allowed the impressions of the journey to settle, preferring that the process ...

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Album Review

Rolf Ericson with the Metropole Orchestra: Beautiful Love

by Jack Bowers
February 1, 1999

Sweden, which has produced an exceedingly large number of world–class Jazz musicians for a country its size, was home to one of the finest of them all, trumpeter Rolf Ericson, whose long and varied career ended with his passing in June 1997. Ericson, an impassioned bop–based improviser with a crystalline tone and irreprovable technique, performed with a veritable who’s who of Jazz greats in Sweden and abroad, listing on his extensive resumé such well–known names as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, ...

Recording

Rolf Ericson & American Stars

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
June 13, 2017

If you check the personnel of Charlie Barnet's band in 1949—the killer one with arrangements by Bobby Sherwood, Manny Albam, Pete Rugolo, Gil Fuller, Dave Matthews and Johnny Richards—you'll find a guy named Rolf Ericson in the trumpet section. Ericson sat next to horn players such as Maynard Ferguson, Lammar Wright, Doc Severinsen, Ray Wetzel and Shorty Rogers, as the personnel shifted on the road and in the recording studio. Ericson had come over to the States in 1947 from ...
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