Born 1964 in Umeå, Sweden; all saxophones, fluteophone.
With the noble exception of Sven-Åke Johansson, the free improvised music scene in Sweden was not thought to exist until the appearance of the double LP, Sounds: Contemporary Swedish improvised music. This (deliberate) documentation of a three-day festival held in Stockholm in 1989 came from a discussion between the artist Edward Jarvis, Harald Hult and Mats Gustafsson. At that time, the music in Sweden was at a very early stage: the duo of Gustafsson and Christian Munthe - 'Two slices of electric car' (with latterly the 'electric' being replaced by 'acoustic' - had begun in 1986 and the trio Gush - Gustafsson, Sten Sandell and Raymond Strid - had started around 1988. However, Gustafsson had also been particularly inspired on first hearing Peter Brötzmann and his playing reflects the obvious energy associated with Brötzmann - in, for example, the Aaly Trio and Quartet - as well as more textural, timbre-focussed areas associated more with free improvisors. The short essay in Gustafsson, M., Hultberg, E., and Millroth, T. (below) points out that Gustafsson has come to improvised music by way of jazz, without himself actually treading the obvious jazz route (i.e. by following Ayler, Coleman and Coltrane who he was too young to be contemporaneous with).
Mats Gustafsson has played widely with musicians from free improvised and jazz backgrounds, both in his native Sweden and abroad. Some of these associations include: a duo with Paul Lovens; various combinations with Paul Lytton, in Günter Christmann's Vario groups and festivals; in Georg Gräwe's Quintet; in duo with Barry Guy and in trio with Guy and Raymond Strid; and in various groups with Roger Turner (1998 saw a brief tour in the UK of the trio of Gustafsson, Turner and Pat Thomas). He played in Derek Bailey's Company in 1990 in London. From the early 1990s, Mats Gustafsson was a regular visitor to the US, forming a particular affinity with Chicago musicians such as Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang and Ken Vandermark and recording for the city's Okka Disk label.
In addition to projects with musicians, Mats Gustafsson has worked extensively with artists from the worlds of dance (Lotta Melin; Helena Franzen; Claire Parsons), theatre (Saara Salminen-Wallin; Lars Rudolfson; Sven-Åke Johansson), poetry (Stig Larsson, Maria Gummesson; Jenny Morelli) and painting (Edward Jarvis; Karin Almlöf; Ann Blom). Some of these combinations were brought together in his 1997 enhanced CD, Impropositions, released by the Swedish Music Information Center.