About

Photo: Victoria Moey

Salomon Jakobsson is a Swedish fingerstyle guitarist and composer who writes his music like stories. Every piece begins as an exploration of a musical idea, and he works as much with the ear as with the mind: intuition on one side — knowledge, schemata and a vast bank of sketches on the other. Building blocks he takes apart, rebuilds and plays with until the story holds. The core of his musical philosophy fits in one line: intuition and playfulness meet tradition and craft. His influences reach from baroque counterpoint to 8-bit music — the fingerstyle guitar shares essentially the same limitations as an old-school 8-bit tracker. And the blues runs like a thread through the tradition he is part of: he carries the legacy of Merle Travis, drawing inspiration from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Tommy Emmanuel.

His concerts are mostly his own compositions, alongside Swedish folk music, fingerstyle classics and baroque, and running through all of it is the technique he has made his own: harp harmonics, the guitar's shimmering bell-voice, which he has spent years developing in ways few players attempt.

Born in Gothenburg, he wanted a guitar at nine — but the waiting list for a teacher was long, so he gave the violin three years first. The guitar arrived at thirteen and never left. He came up the way his generation did: classical lessons at the music school, a hard rock band on the side, endless nights learning from the newly-born YouTube — until a handful of lessons at sixteen with Swedish fingerstyle master Emil Ernebro set the course for good. At eighteen he took second place among two thousand young acts in Musik Direkt, Sweden's biggest youth music competition. He went on to study guitar and composition at the Malmö Academy of Music with composer Rolf Martinsson, and today studies partimento — the improvisation pedagogy of eighteenth-century Italy — with Professor Peter van Tour, bringing its methods to an instrument the tradition never imagined: improvising and composing baroque counterpoint on the fingerstyle guitar.

An Ibanez artist — among the first in the world to test the Artwood series — he performs on a one-of-a-kind prototype, the Artwood Fingerstyle, placed in his hands by its Japanese designer, and he is one of only two players in Sweden with a full D'Addario sponsorship. He has crossed Scandinavia on clinic and promotional tours for Ibanez guitars and Hughes & Kettner amplifiers, released the solo album In the Valley of Notes (2016), and spent years with the Cloud Atlas Trio, from Fanø Free Folk Festival to Copenhagen's Koncertkirken.

Teaching has run alongside playing from the start: he founded his own guitar school in Gothenburg straight out of high school, and has given masterclasses at Freak Guitar Camp (2017 and 2024) — with an appetite for more. Recent years have belonged to composing — writing calm instrumental music professionally for a Stockholm studio — and now the stage has him back: based in Malmö, performing across the Öresund region, with new music and more joy in it than ever.

“A synthesis of classical music, popular harmonies and percussive style… played with incredible virtuosity, yet sensitively.” — Novy Popular, 2016