Born in Hagfors (Värmlands län) in Sweden, Monica Zetterlund was above all an outstanding singer, particularly noted for her jazz songs. As a young girl she started out by listenings to her favourites Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and, in particular, Sarah Vaughn. She began by learning the classic jazz songs from radio and records, initially not knowing the language and what they sang about in English. She went for the melody, rythm and feeling.
Hit songs include Sakta vi gå genom stan (Swedish cover on Walking My Baby Back Home; in Swedish a tribute to Stockholm town), Visa från Utanmyra, Sista jäntan, Trubbel, Gröna små äpplen (Little Green Apples), Monicas vals, Stick iväg, Jack! (Hit the Road Jack), Att angöra en brygga, Var blev ni av, Måne över Stureplan (cover on Sting's Moon Over Bourbon Street) and Under vinrankan (among many, many others). She also interpretated many Swedish national sing-songwriters such as Evert Taube, Olle Adolphson and Povel Ramel for example, and all through her life interpretated international and American jazz musicians/song writers. She worked with some of the greatest international jazz names including Louis Armstrong, Bill Evans, Stan Getz and Quincy Jones, and in the Scandinavian jazz world with people like Georg Riedel, Egil Johansen, Arne Domnerus, Svend Asmussen and Jan Johansson. She elicited a completly personal sound - sober, fragile, poetic - and gave a face to the epithet of the "Scandinavian jazz" sound.
In 1964 she recorded the critically acclaimed jazz album Waltz for Debby with Bill Evans, a record she herself described as "the best I've done" and was most proud of. Her long career also included the song En gång i Stockholm (Once Upon a Time in Stockholm); a jazz ballad with which she represented Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1963. She finished last, however, (mainly because the song genre wasn't suitable for the competition) and scored the infamous null points, but still managed to remain successful in Sweden. She is regarded as a role model by many younger Swedish singers and has a huge Scandinavian fan base. She's considered to be one of the greatest Swedish female vocalists ever and her jazz recordings world class.
Her collaboration with the comic duo Hasseåtage (in the 1960s and 70s) eventually led to a stage career in revues and films. Memorable are her parts in films Att angöra en brygga, Äppelkriget and Jan Troell's Utvandrarna (aka The Emigrants; with Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow in the leads) for which Zetterlund received a Guldbagge (the Golden Beetle - Sweden's finest film award) for Best Supporting Actress. She appeared in more than 20 films and television series throughout her life.
She was known to suffer from scoliosis, and as a result was forced to retire from performing in 1999. She made her last longer official tour in 1997. The last years of her life she was paralyzed and confined to a wheel-chair.
On May 12 2005, she died in an accidental fire in her apartment in Stockholm.
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