The best selling jazz record in Sweden by some distance is none of your usual suspects – Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, Mingus Ah Um, Miles Ahead, and so on, but Jazz på Svenska – Jazz in Sweden – by the pianist Jan Johansson. The album is represented in this valuable anthology by three tracks, including the legendary ‘Visa från Utanmyra’ whose significance is a striking example of a local musician playing jazz that makes sense of his own local musical surroundings (‘Visa från Utanmyra’ is a Swedish folk tune) that had immediate relevance to his own local musical community. A local response to the global musical phenomena of jazz. The song can still be heard on Swedish television and radio, often as a background link between programmes with a voice-over. Of course, there was much more to the visionary pianist than Jazz på Svenska, as this anthology goes some distance to illustrate. He was Stan Getz's pianist of choice during the saxophonist's Scandinavian sojourn in the 1960s, becoming the only European to ever play with Norman Granz’ Jazz at the Philharmonic as a member of Getz's quartet – an association represented by one track. Also a member of that quartet was the legendary bassist/cellist Oscar Pettiford, and two collaborations with Pettiford mark this association. The album includes Johansson's first recordings as a leader (1956), early 1960s recordings with his now legendary trio (1959-61) and some of his collaborations with the brilliant Swedish guitarist Rune Gustafsson including the ultra-rare Young Guitar: The Artistry of Rune Gustafsson (with a facsimile of the album sleeve), an EP of Johansson and Gustafsson, and an EP by the Runestones, a group including Gustafsson and Johansson that is an amusing pastiche of the Duane Eddy guitar sound popular at the time. Clearly the best place to get a handle on Johansson is Jazz på Svenska since this was an enormously influential album whose impact still resonates in the playing of the current generation of Scandinavian pianists from the late Esbjörn Svensson, through Tord Gustaffson to Jan Lundgren and more. But to get a broader picture of Johansson, and his evolution as an artist, then this anthology is indispensable.