bio
photo Geert Vandepoele
(c) Nabeeh Samaan

Jonas Cambien (b.1985) is a Belgian/Norwegian pianist, composer and improviser active in jazz, improvised and contemporary music. With a solid background in classical music, but as much a child of Oslo's freejazz and improvised music scene, his style passes seamlessly from Cecil Taylor to Ligeti, creating his own language on the way.


Most noted for leading Jonas Cambien Trio, featuring André Roligheten on reeds, and Andreas Wildhagen on drums, and the quartet 'Maca Conu', featuring Norwegian bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Danish saxophone player Signe Emmeluth, and drummer Andreas Wildhagen, Cambien has performed on major stages and jazzfestivals in Norway and abroad, and has released several albums on the Portuguese label Clean Feed: ‘A Zoology of the Future’ (2016), ‘We Must Mustn’t We’ (2018), ‘Nature Hath Painted the Body’(2021) and Maca Conu (2024), all to critical acclaim. The American jazz critic John Sharpe picked ‘A Zoology of the Future’ as one of the 10 best jazz albums of 2016, and said about ‘We Must Mustn’t We’: ‘They sound like no-one else.’


Cambien is part of 'The Handover' together with Aly Eissa and Ayman Asfour, a trio that combines deep Arabic folk roots and ritual music of rural Egypt with modern improvisation, krautrock influences and psychedelic shaabi, and has released a critically acclaimed album on Sublime Frequencies. In addition, Cambien performs with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra&Marianna Sangita Røe. He is a founding member of Aksiom, an Oslo-based ensemble for contemporary music, and has guested other ensembles for contemporary music such as Assamissimasa, ensemble neoN and Lemur. He has also performed with some of the major figures in the Scandinavian and global improvised music and freejazz scenes such as Paal Nilssen-Love, Xavier Charles, Dave Rempis, Per Zanussi and Andreas Røysum.