When Gunhild Carling says she comes from a musical family she doesn’t mean her dad owned Kind of Blue. Her childhood was closer to the vaudeville experience of many early jazz and blues musicians. She was on stage as a little girl with the Carling Family Jazz Band in Sweden, and grew into a multilingual multi-instrumentalist with an instinct for wooing crowds and a knack for the ever changing business of music that brought her own Carling Family band to worldwide fame on YouTube long before everyone else was doing it. She relocated to the United States a few years ago and has been recently touring hot spots around the country, including a stint at Birdland that Broadway World said transformed the staid venue with tables and no dance floor into a full-on party.
Her latest album brings all that experience to bear. Bright and inviting, it embraces a certain European ambience that comes naturally with her accent. It has a cinematic presentation, including strings, that will appeal to a broad audience, while the musicianship and vocal performances will please the jazz stalwarts in the crowd. This album does have the feel of a live performance and the tracks are balanced well across the album into a contiguous whole.
Six of ten tracks are her originals, something that pleased and to some degree surprised me. I think of Carling as foremost an entertainer, known for breaking out the bagpi
