Johannes Gammelgaard Lauritsen

Johannes Gammelgaard Lauritsen was born in Aalborg, Denmark, and grew up in a home with piano, a guitar and several flutes. He showed interest in music early on and started playing the saxophone at age 10. In 3rd grade he joined the school bigband with which he travelled to play in Germany and twice in the USA. This made a great impact on him, and he decided to continue his music studies.
In 10th grade he attended a boarding school focusing solely on music. Here he initiated his first jazz quartet with which he played for several years and won a number of music competitions for young bands in Denmark. After high school, which he attended simultaneously with a 3-year pre-academic course in music, he took a year off to play and work. After hearing a concert with a band from Jaipur in India, he decided to go alone on a trip to India for 2 months in April 2013. With him, he had a cheap alto saxophone, which lead to many meetings with musicians from all over the world.
Back in Denmark, he attended the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus and graduated as a bachelor in 2016, including one term at the academy in Hamburg. Then he went on to study the master programme NOMAZZ (Nordic Master in Jazz), a collaboration between the academies in Aarhus, Helsinki and Stockholm. After having met the love of his life in Aarhus, an exchange student from Sweden, he decided to move with her to Stockholm in 2017, where he since then has lived and worked as a musician and music teacher as well as other part time jobs. Here he has also formed his main project, the Johannes Gammelgaard Kvartett with which he explores his musical roots including Danish church hymns and folk songs. The quartet has so far toured in both Denmark and Sweden and released a digital EP (Johannes Gammelgaard Kvartett, 2019) and an LP (I Venners Lag, 2021).

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