By Paul Freeman [September 2017 Interview]

Mads Tolling is a worldly musician. Raised in Denmark, the Grammy-winning jazz violinist moved to the U.S. to study at Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music. He’s now based in the Bay Area. When reached by phone, he had just performed in Japan and was relishing a bit of sightseeing.

Legendary violinist Jean-Luc Ponty was teaching a master class at Berklee and was impressed by Tolling’s playing. He recommended him to Stanley Clarke, when the great electric bassist was forming a new band.

After his stint with Clarke, Tolling spent eight years with Turtle Island String Quartet, honing his string arranging skills and learning more about the business side of music. He has since written a violin concerto for the Oakland Symphony. Tolling released his own first album in 2008 and formed The Mads Men in 2014. The original lineup included three other top-notch musicians — Colin Hogan on piano and accordion, Sam Bevan on bass, and Eric Garland on drums.

His latest album with that quartet is “Playing the 60s.” It features such classics of the era as “A Taste of Honey,” “My Girl,” “Meet The Flintstones,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “The Look of Love.” Tolling has put his own fresh spin on each number.

Currently based in Albany, California, with his girlfriend, Libby Fritz, who works for a San Francisco financial firm, Tolling, 37, continues to seek new challenges.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
Are you enjoying the visit to Japan?

MADS TOLLING:
It’s been just amazing. First the concert we had in Kanazawa was something special. And then just traveling around with my parents, seeing Japan as a tourist. It’s fun. You don’t really get to do that too much. As a musician, you don’t get to really see the cities that you’re playing in. So it’s great to have a chance to do that.

PCC:
Have you found a lot of jazz fans there?

TOLLING:
Yeah, it’s very cool. Wherever you go, they’re playing jazz — in restaurants and cafes and so forth. Jazz is probably part of the society, I think, maybe even more so that the U.S., I don’t know.

PCC:
Love the new album. It’s such a great idea, how did the concept come together for you?

TOLLING:
Actually, it was a friend of mine who said, “Why don’t you use your name [laughs] to your advantage?” Because I have kind of an unusual name — Mads is Danish. So that was the first idea. And then I loved that show “Mad Men,” as well. And that show is really all about the 60s, from 1960 to 1969. So simply taking tunes that were from that era, the”Mad Men” era, things that were typically associated with that time, probably, growing up.

I didn’t grow up in that time, but people can relate to things they saw in movies or TV show, on the radio — sort of apple pie, anything that’s just sort of typical American. And I’m now an American citizen. I gained citizenship last year, as well as Danish citizenship. So yeah, it was kind of a timely album now, I feel, in that way. So that’s kind of how it all came together.

PCC:
So were you familiar with the songs, the TV themes, from reruns? Did you get those shows in Denmark?

TOLLING:
Yeah, I watched like “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly,” of course. That was a very influential movie on me, I would say. And then “Meet The Flintstones,” I enjoyed a lot when I was a kid. And they certainly have had some reruns of those shows in Denmark. Some of them they didn’t, like “Hawaii Five-O,” was not well known at all. But part of the fun of the album was to integrate the whole band in the decision-making, as far as the songs that would be played.

So everybody would arrange, come with their own ideas of what songs to do. And sometimes it’s fun to take a song that is associated with one thing and then do something completely different. Like Colin Hogan, who is the pianist in the group, he took “All Along The Watchtower,” which is so iconic, with Hendrix and Dylan, and then made it into a salsa tune, integrating the montuno and things that are pretty unrelated, but yet it really works. And that’s sort of what the project was all about — getting everybody involved.

PCC:
And I guess part of the fun of the quartet is the way you mix genres so effectively?

TOLLING:
For sure. And you find a lot of genre-mixing on this album, I feel. We tackle some of the Motown material — “My Girl” — some of the funky aspects and then we have a little bit of the jazz fusion with “Mission Impossible,” which goes into the odd time signature. That’s sort of a John McLaughlin Mahavishnu Orchestra vibe. And you add that to the more straight-ahead jazz, like “Meet The Flintstones,“ “Taste of Honey” and so forth.

PCC:
What do you think is the magic of that era — the 60s?

TOLLING:
I think it was a time of a lot of political turmoil, which relates, in some ways, to today’s situation. And it was also a time where a lot of things changed and a lot of the old style of politeness, political correctness and things like that went out the window. And I think it was a refreshing time where people really fought for something they believed in. You were able to do it back then, where it might have been tougher 10 years before.

And I think that came out in music, too. There was a lot of juxtaposition, in terms of the music world and people coming out with very different things. In the beginning, you had The Beatles doing these Chuck Berry type of things and then, in the end, there were these minimalist-produced, kind of almost machine-generated things and samples of things, just eight years later. And that’s sort of the progression that happened during that decade.

I think it kind of symbolized a liberation from something very straight, kind of Chuck Berry, Elvis and then into something much more modern. And some people liked “Sgt. Pepper” and some people didn’t. But that was the cool thing about it — you were able to do that and make a thing and a hit. And I think that’s what attracts me about the era.

PCC:
You first picked up the violin at age six?

TOLLING:
Yeah, I started very early, using the Suzuki method, playing with my sister.

PCC:
What was it about that particular instrument that spoke to you so early on?

TOLLING:
I think it at first it was almost like a desire to learn to play it well. It’s a very difficult instrument. So we sort of got drilled early on to do it the correct way. So I think I was just following directions and wanted to do it well. At first, it was classical music, which I don’t think would have lasted, as far as me playing music, if I had gone that route. For me, it was too regimented. You had to do it a certain way. You have to follow your teacher closely. I think I always really wanted to express more my own thing.

And so, when I learned about jazz, you learn about harmony. There’s so much to connect it to composition and arranging right away. And I think that’s what interested me a lot was that expression that I could go and do something on my own and call it music and it was fine and people would play it.

And then, of course, the violin is so unusual in jazz, that now it’s kind of a cool thing. “Oh, he plays jazz on it. Wow, I don’t know what that is, but let’s go check it out.” So that’s part of the fun now, for sure.

PCC:
So that wasn’t daunting, it was part of the attraction, that the violin was so unusual, relatively speaking, in jazz?

TOLLING:
Yeah. For me, surely it was. Of course, sometimes when you talk to people, it takes a little explanation sometimes. They’re not sure. They say, “Well, jazz is supposed to be saxophone and trumpet, not violin. Violin is supposed to be Yitzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell.” Most people have that idea.

I actually grew up in a country, Denmark, where jazz violin was rather common, because we had this jazz violinist — Svend Asmussen, who just passed away at age 100, and he was such a big icon and a famous musician that most people over there would know who he is, even kids now. So because of him, all these guys came out and started playing jazz violin. So it became a thing, sort of like what you had in France with Stéphane Grappelli. And then you had violinists coming out of that. We had a similar thing in Denmark. So it wasn’t quite as unusual.

But that’s not the case in other places. I’m in Japan now and they love jazz, but they don’t have a lot of jazz violin themselves. So they go, “But that’s supposed to be in the Symphony Orchestra, not in The Blue Note, you know.” [The Blue Note Jazz Festival is held in Japan]. But there again, it’s part of the fun for me anyways.

PCC:
So when and how were you first exposed to jazz? Were your parents into it? How did you discover it?

TOLLING:
Yeah, my dad was into jazz. He would listen a lot to Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis. He was the probably guy who introduced me to it, more than anybody. He had a cassette tape of Miles Davis and I was 14. We were actually traveling around the world on a trip [chuckles]. We were quite adventurous. My parents wanted to us to see I guess kind of the Third World, people that were not as fortunate as we were, growing up.

So we were in Thailand and he handed me a cassette tape of Miles Davis playing all these great songs — I remember “Autumn Leaves,” some things from “Birth of the Cool.” And yeah, I just loved the sound for some reason. It was not like I had listened to a lot of jazz before. So it wasn’t something I could really recognize. I just enjoyed the intimacy and expression without really knowing what it was. And then I was off on this journey of learning that music. And it really took me on this new path, where before, I had been going more on a classical path. And at that point, I went more in the jazz path.

PCC:
Who were the key influences, once you got into jazz?

TOLLING:
Certainly I listened to Stéphane Grappelli. I listened to Svend Asmussen, the guy I mentioned. I listened to Stuff Smith. And I would simply copy, sometimes note-for-note, what those guys would play. And I think that’s the way you’ve got to do it. At the beginning, you just imitate. It’s sort of like learning a language, where you’re just figuring out the basics and the feel and all that, so you can learn to speak it better. And that’s what I did for a while. Later I got to really start to write and find my own voice. But yeah, I was classically trained and your basic tone is your basic tone. Your aesthetics are, of course, different because of where you come from and so forth. So I used all that to my advantage, I guess.

PCC:
And then the decision to come to the U.S. to study at Berklee, was that an easy one, because of the school’s prestige? Or was it difficult to make such a big change?

TOLLING:
Yeah, it was a difficult one, because I’d gotten into the conservatory in Copenhagen, which was a very good school. It was not easy to get in. And I was going to do that and then, all of a sudden, a friend told me about Berklee and it sounded like an adventure, to be able to go to the U.S., study jazz where it was born and try something different. So it was a difficult one. It was one that also involved spending a bit more, because actually in Denmark, education, university, you don’t have to pay for it. So yeah, it was not easy. I’m glad I made the decision. Though I wasn’t planning to stay for 17 years. I was planning to stay for a year maybe, try it out and see. But then I kept getting opportunities that allowed me to stay, so it made sense to stay much longer. So that’s what happened.

PCC:
Was it a difficult adjustment, experiencing a new culture? Or did that come easily?

TOLLING:
It wouldn’t have been as much of an adjustment as for someone who’s from say China or Japan, because the culture has a little more similarities to the European culture, I guess. But it was certainly an adjustment. I mean, I didn’t know anybody. I came there completely by myself. Of course, I went to school where everybody’s kind of networking. Everybody’s a musician. So you speak the language of music. But it took a while to kind of get into the scene. But I felt good there. I felt like I was on my own, which is kind of nice, too. It kind of tied in with the approach to jazz, where you’re trying to find your own voice and trying to find your own path. It felt good to be on my own there.

PCC:
And then was it Jean-Luc Ponty who suggested you join Stanley Clarke? Or how did that come about?

TOLLING:
Yeah, he actually taught a master class at Berklee. As part of that, I jumped up on stage and played for him. And then came up and played with me and we started jamming on “Armando’s Rhumba” — it’s a Chick Corea piece — and he seemed very nice and positive and so forth about my playing.

But a whole year went by. And I guess Stanley was looking to put a new band together and he was looking for a violinist. And that’s when he recommended me. And yeah, it was like a dream come true. I went on tour for the first time with Stanley and his band. And I worked with him for seven years after that, kind of on and off, in his band. It was a great way to learn the ropes of the touring life, things to do and things not to do [chuckles] when you’re out on the road. But he was certainly a great mentor for me to have at that early age.

PCC:
What were your impressions of Stanley? What impressed you most about him?

TOLLING:
I think it was his ability to make a real show, as opposed to looking serious and playing your instrument and just playing the right notes or playing good music, which of course, is a given that you have to do that. But it was really his ability to connect with the audience, have fun onstage, the playfulness of his playing. And then also just his amazing ability on the instrument. And his improv skills were just amazing on the bass.

It showed me it doesn’t matter what instrument you’re playing. It’s about what you can say as an improviser and as a musician that matters. And he was able to do that on the bass — one of the first people to do that on the electric bass. And so it taught me a lot about just what’s possible. And it was very inspiring. He was a very good leader, very generous and fun to work with on stage and left a lot of the room to everybody else in the band. So, yeah, it was kind of a perfect situation.

PCC:
And the Turtle Island Quartet — what was that whole experience like? What did it mean to your musical growth?

TOLLING:
Yeah, it was a little bit different side of my music, I think compared to Stanley. It was much more about running a band. I was kind of on the inside with that, because we were all kind of partners together. And in terms of music, it was also a lot about writing and arranging and putting songs together. And putting songs together in an unusual fashion was a lot about what Turtle Island was about. When you have a string quartet, there’s no bass or drums or piano. But we were playing Jimi Hendrix, Chick Corea, John Coltrane, so when you’re doing that, you really need to put arrangements together and put extra effort into the group you’re writing for. And that taught me a lot about how to arrange.

For example, I wrote a piece now for the Oakland Symphony, a violin concerto that I played. And I just played in Japan as well. But I would not be able to do that, had I not been in a group like that. In the beginning, when I started arranging, it was unfamiliar to me. I could maybe write some things with a lead sheet with a jazz context. But really writing for these specific instruments, it taught me a lot. And I think all of the great composers like Beethoven and Haydn and so forth, some of their most iconic work was in string quartet writing. I think that’s because of that, because a string quartet is a very bare format, where you really get to show your chops as a composer and as an arranger. I didn’t have those chops in the beginning, but I then developed them.

The other side of it was playing viola. I joined that group on viola, when I was 23. They asked me, “Did you have any viola experience before?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, sure,” although I’d never played viola before [laughs]. So it took me a while to get that, but I dedicated a lot of time and effort. So I was in that group for four years on viola, which is also a good thing, to have that ability — a little bit bigger instrument, a little bit more inside-the-harmony kind of instrument. And then the last four years, I was on violin. So, yeah, I had a good eight years and learned a lot about business and running a group, as well. So that was a very good combination of bands I was in, I think.

PCC:
So then, leading your own band, that was just part of the natural progression?

TOLLING:
Yeah, I would say so, yeah. It happened in 2012, it was time to move on and try to stand on my own. And I’d already done that. I think my first album was in 2008. And then I did “The Playmaker,” which got a lot of attention with the press and NPR in 2010. And so I was ready to do something at that point. And yeah, it was going to be first a quartet with guitar, bass and drums. And it had a little bit more of a fusion sound at first. I was writing some originals, we were doing some Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra, and arranging. Everybody was contributing, as well to it. So we had that band and we were playing around the U.S. and mainly in the Bay Area.

And then I started Mads Men in 2014-15. We started getting more serious about that concept. And the cool thing about that is, of course, I think we recorded 14 songs on the album or something like that, but you can add songs from that era and there are so many songs from the 60s that are great and that symbolize the 60s. So you just kind of have at it. So the current formula is piano instead of guitar. What happens a lot of times in bands is people simply move and so a couple of the members moved to Los Angeles, so I had to kind of reinvent the group and change some things.

I’m lucky to live in the Bay Area, where there are a lot of great musicians, some musicians who should be more known than they are. It’s maybe not as much of an exposure type of area as Los Angeles or New York. But there are a lot of great musicians.

So I was lucky to find good guys to work with. And Eric, who’s the drummer in the band had been there for the longest. He has been there from the beginning. And he’s part of a group known as The Jazz Mafia, which is very popular in San Francisco and is really kind of the quintessential Bay Area band. So he’s one of those guys who’s been here for a long time and is part of the scene. And Colin Hogan, who is the pianist, he’s in Tommy Igo’s big band and works a lot around town, too, And we have Josh Thurston-Milgram, who I met at the Stanford Jazz Workshop a few years, a great bass player. We had another great bass player who was on the album and he moved to New York — Sam Bevan. So that’s what happens. So we play with him whenever we’re more out East. So we have players strategically located in different parts of the country [laughs].

PCC:
It sounds like there could be more volumes of “Playing The 60s,” more songs from that era.

TOLLING:
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what the next thing is. Releasing an album, especially when you’re doing a lot on your own, it’s a lot of work. And you have to find the funds for it, of course, a way to fund it. But yeah, I wish I could make an album every year. But certainly it will interesting to see what we come up with next. It’s a lot of fun when you have it to ready to go and put it together and it’s finally out. And it’s a labor of love, going into the studio, tweaking the songs, making them sound good. I’m pretty happy with what we ended up with.

Stanley Clarke plays on a track. Also, having a few guest vocalists on there — Spencer Day, who’s a very, very talented guy, who lives in San Diego now and Kalil Wilson is on there. Kenny Washington is on there. He’s just a treasure, almost like a hidden gem in the Bay Area. Outside the Bay Area, a lot of people don’t know about him. But he’s fantastic, just a natural talent. He can scat incredibly. So it’s a good variety. And we’ll see what’s next.

PCC:
And you’re teaching, as well?

TOLLING:
Yeah, that’s right. I do a fair number of master classes, workshops. And a lot of times you go out and play concerts and kind of tie the classes into it. And I have some private students. A part of it for me is getting the next generation involved and getting more jazz violinists out there. There’s not a lot of us. So the few who want to do it, I try to give them a chance to figure out what it’s all about. I’ve definitely had some good students through the years.

PCC:
Do you find that your music defines you, or do you try to make that just one component of your life?

TOLLING:
It’s a good question — what defines you. I think for me, music has definitely defined me quite a bit [laughs], because it just kind of takes over, in terms of what you’re doing. When you’re not writing or you’re not playing, you’re always thinking about the next thing and thinking about doing the business thing and reaching out to people and being involved. And then you want to also support other people and go out and listen to music. So all that stuff, you just feel that you kind of need more than one person, sometimes to do all that [laughs]. So I definitely feel like it doesn’t stop at five, you know. It just keeps going all day long and all night long. So that’s been a big part of it.

And for me also, the touring has really picked up. I do a lot of tours in Scandinavia. I put the whole tour together myself, with all the booking and touring. Planning something like that is an incredible amount of work. But it’s fun. And it’s also good in terms of the business, meeting all those people. You can imagine, it starts to really take over your life, when you do that. So it’s always good to have a great partner, which I do. And she kind of balances it out. We get to go on vacations and take time off. That’s important. But it definitely has a way of taking over a lot, for sure.

PCC:
But I guess the outside adventures feed into the music and give you more to draw from creatively.

TOLLING:
Yeah, that’s true, too, for sure. Everything informs your music. Things inform each other. And certainly in music, that’s what you want, because you’re writing from a certain perspective and everything that’s going on in your life affects that. It’s good.

PCC:
I read that you had once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with your father. That must have been quite an adventure.

TOLLING:
Yeah, that’s true. It was 2000, a while back. But yeah, we made it to the summit, although I was probably feeling the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. I got the altitude sickness and all that. And we were stupid. We didn’t realize, on the top, it’s freezing cold. I mean, there’s a glacier there, I think. We had thin jackets. We thought, we’re going to be in Tanzania, it’s warm. So, yeah, it was quite the experience. But we made it.

PCC:
At least you have the satisfaction of having made it.

TOLLING:
Yeah, but believe me, at one point, there was no way I was going to walk any longer. But I guess I was overcome with the desire to go to the top [laughs]. My dad and I did make it to the top. My mom and sister had to retire a little bit early. But when you’re from a country where the highest hill is 400 feet, going up to 19,000 feet is quite a change.

PCC:
Do you find that you’re always seeking new challenges, in music and in life?

TOLLING:
Yeah. I would say that. I’m always looking for development. I’m always looking to do things that are a little different. The easy way doesn’t necessarily appeal to me. A lot of times, my manager or my agent will tell me, “Hey, why don’t you just do this? This is easier.” And sometimes they’re right, because doing it harder doesn’t always make it better and it takes more time. But for sure, I’m looking for new challenges and things that will make me move to the next thing.

Also I think it’s important for me to reach a younger audience, too, as you do new things. I’m kind of messing around with a loop peddle, where you can loop over yourself and play, just by one person, creating all these loops. I can do an octave pedal or I can play like a bass or I can do rhythm and so forth. And that’s certainly been done with violin. But it’s one of those things that people know with guitar, which is more common. But yeah, I’m trying to do stuff like that with violin. A lot of people seem to enjoy that. Who knows? Maybe that’s something I might do a lot more of. I think I might, because it seems to also attract…It’s like building Legos — you start with a simple thing and then layer on top of it and then, all of a sudden, you have something. And, yeah, I enjoy that sort of exploration.

PCC:
So at this point, what do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of the life in music?

TOLLING:
I think it’s the travel for sure. It’s kind of cool, like we played last year in Japan and one of the concerts was at a very beautiful temple, a UNESCO-protected landmark. And we got to get the private tour that nobody else gets and were able to see the all these areas. I thought, “Wow, because we do music, we get to go here and see all this.” And that can be a very rewarding part of playing, is going out and seeing the world with people you like and seeing the local cultures. And you just feel connected with it, because you’re sharing your music.

You’re bringing some joy to society. And that sharing experience is so important. And that’s the cool thing — you can go to Japan, go to Russia, Sri Lanka — and you say, “Autumn Leaves,” they may not know English, but they know the song. Or you say “Take The A Train.” And they know. So that aspect of it, I enjoy immensely. And to reach people you would otherwise not reach and see things you would otherwise not see — that’s really fun. And then again, that whole thing we were talking about — challenging yourself, moving further, always trying things — is another aspect of it I enjoy.

For the latest news on this artist, visit www.madstolling.com.