For some musicians, jazz is the music they play but for multi-talented Gunhild Carling, jazz is her life. She grew up surrounded by it and now her children are talented musicians in their own right.
Carling now has performed and led several of her own bands including Gunhild Carling and the Carling Big Band. Right now she’s performing several live concerts a week over social media including her Carling Darlings. She’s recorded several CDs, her first in 1984 with her family called I’ve Lost My Heart In Dixieland and has continually put out albums including the recent Harlem Joy in 2015.
Carling’s parents were accomplished musicians in their own right. Her father, Hans Carling, was a trumpet legend in Sweden, where Carling was born and raised, and her mother, trained as a classical violinist, picked up the banjo. Carling remembers playing her first instrument, the drum, where she could decently hold at beat, in her parent’s Friday night performances at the age of four. It’s her earliest memory. At six, she learned to play recorder and remembers that she could bend the notes the way she wanted to, a useful skill later on with trumpet and trombone. But it was seven when she would begin to learn jazz on the instrument that is her favorite, the trombone.
“The trombone is the freedom instrument. You can play melodies and you can lead because the trombone is loud enough to le
