Niklas Winter & Mark Lotz
Compositions and improvisations in contemporary jazz
Niklas Winter
Guitar, fx
Niklas Winter is a jazz guitarist and composer born in Turku, Finland. He has made nine albums as a leader and many more as a co-leader and sideman, having recorded with Kenny Wheeler, Lars Jansson, Henry Lowther, Severi Pyysalo and many others.
Winter studied classical guitar at the Turku Conservatory during 1985-1990 and later, at Berklee College of Music in the mid-’90s.
Collaborations include guitar duos with Jesse Van Ruller, Ulf Wakenius, John Stowell, Søren Lee, Libor Smoldas, Lorenzo Cominoli, Teemu Viinikainen and with vibraphonist Severi Pyysalo and with flutist Mark Lotz and trumpeter Henry Lowther.
Band projects include Niklas Winter Quartet, Winter’s Jazz Workshop and a collaboration with Henry Lowther and the Utopia Chamber Choir in Winter’s Graduale project.
Winter has played concerts with the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in productions with Kiri Te Kanawa and in Mikko Heiniö’s Opera, Erik XIV. He has performed at the London Jazz Festival, The Union Chappell in London, Pori Jazz Festival, Tampere Jazz Festival, Copenhagen and Aarhus Jazz Festivals, Orta and Nuoro Jazz Festivals, Turku Jazz and Turku Music Festival, Viapori Jazz Festival, Katedraali Soi!, Sacred Music Festival, Yokohama Jazz Promenade,
Juhla Tokyo Festival, Beijing Contemporary Music Festival and the Bohemia Jazz Fest, to name a few. Since the year 2000, Winter has also composed music for television documentaries for the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE.
Niklas has been a guitar instructor for some 25 years in Novia and Jyväskylä and Oulu Universities of Applied Sciences until spring 2023. Now he works as a freelancer musician doing concerts and workshops around the globe.
Mark Lotz
piccolo, concert-, alto-, bass-flutes, bansuri, fx
Raised in Thailand, Uganda and Germany my appetite for musical adventures takes me all over the globe. Always on the lookout for vibrant collaborations with unique voices in music, far from conventional, hitting the essence and celebrate life.
My solo recitals in contemporary music, interpretations of Afro Cuban , West African music and free improvised music especially gained much international acclaim. I worked with a.o.: Chris Potter, David Tronzo, Don Byron, conga legend Miguel ‘Anga’ Diaz, soloists of the Conjunto Folklorico National de Cuba, Indian Underground star Najma Akthar, the Nightingale of Tibet Namghal Lhamo, electronic music pioneer Bob Ostertag, Moldavian violist Anatol Steffanet, Romanian accordion phenomenon Petar Ralchev, legendary NYC salsa icon Eddy Martinez, Thomas Strønen, RnB star Leon Ware or the wet dogs from Istanbul ‘Islak Köpek‘. And Dutch artists like Theo Lovendie, Jesse van Ruller, Michael Moore, Han Bennink or Ernst Reijseger.
I teach flute at the Utrecht (HKU) and Rotterdam (Codarts) Conservatories in The Netherlands.
Los Angeles Jazz Scene (USA)
“Mark Lotz is one of the world’s top jazz flute players.”
CultureJazz (France)
“This is a musician who makes no compromises.”
Jazz Da Gama (Canada)
“Lotz Is the kind of artist who seems forever at the service of his art, which is to say he draws attention to the music, employing his genius to let the music glow in the dark.“
