Gunhild Carling at Jazz, TX

Gunhild Carling
Jazz, TX
The New Season 2025/25
San Antonio, TX
October 23, 2025

Audiences at Jazz TX are accustomed to programming with a dash of camp. The 2025 fall season includes these theme shows: Soul'd Out (featuring Adam Carillo and His Quartet), Villains and Magic (A Disney Halloween), Vintage Vegas Song Night (with Noelle Goforth & Three Swings and a Miss), Jazz TX Breaks a Leg (The Magic of Broadway), The Music of Walt Disney (Volume III), Four Hunks Play Monk, Mistletoe Melodies, and no less than a dozen other Christmas holiday offerings. You get the picture.

Vaudeville in her Veins

So it comes as no surprise that an evening with California-based Swedish multi-instrumentalist and singer Gunhild Carling was, at times, a bit on the nose. Literally, on the nose. This is a woman who can, and did, play a trumpet balanced on her proboscis while plucking an upright bass, which she borrowed from Austin-based Ben Triesch , her bassist for the evening. Clearly, Carling has Vaudeville in her veins. She encapsulates her upbringing this way:

I haven't ever been to a music teacher. I come from a family that plays music. I grew up in the south of Sweden, outside of Malmö. Our house was full of variety—circus, acting, dance, vaudeville and novelty. I just picked up instruments from when I was very young and played them. I started with the drums, then the recorder, trombone and trumpet. Then I started tap dancing, and after that harmonica and bagpipe. Later, I began composing music.

Twenty Numbers, Ten instruments

Carling played 10 instruments in a set of some 20 numbers—mainly in the traditional jazz realm—beginning on trumpet with her own "Miller Avenue," which is based on Paul Barbarin's "Bourbon Street Parade," she said with a wink, but with a different lyric, melody and set of chord changes. A tune or two later, she moved to trombone (her favorite instrument) for "Swedish Tigers," the raison d'etre for which she explained: "There are no tigers in Sweden, so we have to invent them." The piece, as you may have guessed, is based on "Tiger Rag." Staying with trombone, she strolled through the capacity crowd on "Just A Closer Walk with Thee."

Growing up, she had played a lot of Early Music on recorders with her family, she explained to the audience as she grabbed a soprano recorder, giving an impressive little taste of what some of that might have sounded like. But in her fast version of Luiz Bonfa's "Samba de Orfeu," the performance style was quite different—full of glissy blue notes and jazz inflections. And speaking of the blues, she pulled out a blues harp for the next tune, wailing on a "Night Train"-based original that proved to be a surprise high point of the evening. Following that was her own "Love Song from The Attic," a lovely ballad with a beautiful bridge, which she sang with a poignant lilt reminiscent of Billie Holiday.

On the novelty side, she called in the spirit of Rahsaan Roland Kirk for an impromptu piece she called "San Antonio Blues," which she played simultaneously on two trumpets and a cornet. Another unusual choice was a bluesy rendition of "Amazing Grace," performed on a "thousand-year-old Swedish bagpipe." And she switched shoes and jumped off the stage for a tap dance during her rousing encore, never missing a beat.

German Opera

Carling went to the piano toward the end of the set, taking requests from the audience, including "I Only Have Eyes For You," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Stardust" and ABBA's "Dancing Queen."

When someone asked for "German opera," she unsheathed "Mack the Knife" from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928), singing it in the original German, abruptly causing some fans to 'reimagine' the setting. Following along with the German lyric, it is easy to flash forward to the present, in Texas or elsewhere in the US, with people disappearing inexplicably and a sinister anti-hero (Mackie Messer, "who no-one asks and who knows nothing") always on the scene, knife hidden like the shark's teeth, there to negotiate a "happy ending" in which "everything comes together, provided the necessary money is available." The satirical edge the work had in Germany as WWII was brewing and during the McCarthy era of the '50s in the US is still embedded in the tune.

Consummate Craft and a Big Smile

One big takeaway of the evening was Carling's abundant old-school professionalism. She obviously knows how to keep an audience entertained—no mean feat in an age of 30-second reels on social media—but it goes deeper than that. She plays the music she loves—especially traditional New Orleans jazz, but also Renaissance recorder and other idioms—with plenty of heart and intelligence and—over years on the road—she has honed the many skills needed to work smoothly with a pick-up band and make all the arrangements work.

These run the gamut from subtle eyes-only non-verbal gestures to different kinds of saves: ways of creating an instant new ending if the drummer or someone else misses the cutoff, ways of gently but surely changing the tempo when, after an out-of-time intro, the band settles into a tempo that is slower than desired. When this happened with "Dream a Little Dream of Me," the second tune of the evening, Carling remained serene. There was no gradual pulling-teeth acceleration. She simply came in with the melody at her tempo, sweet and clear, sounding right as rain.

Carling worked incredibly hard during all of her 90 minutes on the stage that night—arguably as hard as James Brown, but in her own way, juggling instruments and other elements, keeping all the balls in the air with consummate craft and a big smile.

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