Morten Lund was born September 13, 1972, in Viborg, Denmark, into a musical household — his father played drums, trumpet, and guitar, his mother played flute — and he started on drums himself as a young child, taking his first paid gig at fifteen. In 1993 he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, where he studied alongside a fellow student, bassist Jesper Bodilsen, who would go on to become one of his most important musical partners. He was still enrolled there in 1994 when he joined the internationally recognized Klüvers Big Band, recording with them as a student before completing his diploma in 1997 and relocating to Copenhagen to build a full-time career.

The relationship that would define Lund's international profile began not in a club but at a jazz festival: he, Bodilsen, and Italian pianist Stefano Bollani were all selected for the sextet Enrico Rava assembled around his 2002 Jazzpar Prize (documented on record as Happiness Is..., released 2003 on Stunt Records). The chemistry between the three was strong enough that they formed a standing trio in 2003. Their debut, Mi Ritorni In Mente (2004, Stunt Records), became a genuine crossover success — it reportedly ranked among Italy's ten best-selling records that year, an unusual feat for a piano trio date, and led to the group's New York debut at Birdland. A second album, Gleda – Songs From Scandinavia (2005, Stunt Records), turned toward Nordic folk and popular song and earned the trio an Australian Jazz Bell Award nomination for Best International Jazz Release.

By the end of the decade the trio had moved to the most prestigious address in European jazz: Stone in the Water (ECM 2080), recorded in October 2008 at Avatar Studios in New York and released in September 2009, produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher himself. Five years later the group expanded for Joy in Spite of Everything (ECM 2360, recorded June 2013 at Avatar Studios, released 2014), adding American saxophonist Mark Turner and guitarist Bill Frisell to the core trio — a quintet lineup that pushed the group's chamber-jazz intimacy into more open, exploratory territory without losing the lyricism that had defined it from the start.

Lund's own artist biography and multiple secondary sources credit him as a member of two ensembles led by Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu: the Devil Quartet and the Kind of Porgy and Bess project. That affiliation is well attested outside Discogs, but it comes with a documentation wrinkle worth flagging plainly: Discogs' release-level personnel credits for all three of the Devil Quartet's studio albums — Stanley Music! (2007, Blue Note), Desertico (2013, Tǔk Music), and Carpe Diem (2018, Tǔk Music) — list Italian drummer Stefano Bagnoli behind the kit, not Lund. Lund's only Fresu-adjacent studio credit that Discogs actually documents is Temenos (2003), a Lars Jansson/Bohuslän Big Band date featuring Fresu as a guest soloist. The most honest reading is that Lund's time with Fresu's groups was substantially a touring/live-lineup role rather than one reflected in their commercially released studio discography — a distinction the source material doesn't resolve, so it's stated here rather than papered over.

What Discogs documents in exhaustive detail is the sheer scale of Lund's work as a first-call sideman: well over 150 credited releases spanning three decades, the great majority of them Danish and Nordic dates. He has recorded repeatedly with vocalists Cæcilie Norby, Katrine Madsen, and Sinne Eeg; guitarist Ulf Wakenius; pianist Martin Schack; and saxophonist Benjamin Koppel, among many others, while keeping a foot in big-band and orchestral work through the Klüvers Big Band, the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra, and Bohuslän Big Band. A longer-running partnership was with pianist Jan Lundgren — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — whom Lund joined as the Jan Lundgren Trio's drummer around 2000, replacing founding drummer Rasmus Kihlberg, a change documented on 2003's Svenska Landskap (Sittel Records); the two reunited in 2017 for the all-Nordic quartet date Potsdamer Platz. In 2006 the Ben Webster Foundation recognized this body of work with the Ben Webster Prize, one of Danish jazz's most prestigious honors.

The Nordic all-star circuit has remained a constant. Lund is the drummer on Lars Danielsson and Marius Neset's Sun Blowing (2016, ACT Music), and the same year he appeared in the touring lineup captured on Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic V: Lost Hero – Tears for Esbjörn, a live tribute concert alongside pianist Iiro Rantala, guitarist Ulf Wakenius, bassist Lars Danielsson, and vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy. That relationship with Rantala has continued into the current decade: Lund plays drums on Trinity (ACT, recorded May 2025 at Château Palmer in Margaux-Cantenac, France, released November 2025), Rantala's trio record with bassist Kaisa Mäensivu.

Most recently, Lund has co-led a trio with pianist Henrik Gunde and his longtime partner Jesper Bodilsen under the name Moods, releasing an eponymous debut in 2022 and Moods, Vol. 2 in 2023 on the Danish label Mingus Records, with holiday-themed releases following in 2025 — a project not yet reflected in Discogs' catalog but documented on the trio's own Spotify releases. Lund's Spotify artist bio describes him simply as "an award winning danish copenhagen based jazz- and sessiondrummer, composer and educator," a description that undersells a career now well into its fourth decade of nearly continuous studio and stage work.

Lund's reputation rests on a lyrical, touch-sensitive style that favors serving a song over asserting itself — the quality that made him the right drummer for the chamber-jazz intimacy of the Bollani/Bodilsen/Lund trio and for ECM's spacious, dynamics-first production aesthetic on Stone in the Water and Joy in Spite of Everything. According to his own biography, he studied with two towering figures of the Copenhagen drumming lineage, Alex Riel and Ed Thigpen — a claim not independently cross-verified here but consistent with his subsequent output, which favors brushwork, restraint, and rhythmic flexibility over volume. That sensitivity translates equally well to a vocal-forward pop-song trio like Moods, a big-band chart with the Klüvers Big Band or Aarhus Jazz Orchestra, and the free-floating, dynamically wide small-group settings of Nordic labels like ACT and ECM — range that explains why he has stayed in such continuous demand across so many different kinds of Danish and international jazz projects.