Mads Tolling & Matt Eakle Band

Mads Tolling

Mads Tolling is an internationally renowned violinist and composer originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, now living in San Francisco. As a former nine-year member of both bassist Stanley Clarke’s band and the celebrated Turtle Island Quartet, Tolling has won two Grammy Awards and was nominated for a third Grammy in 2015. He was also the 2016 winner of the DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star Violin Award. Tolling has performed with Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Kenny Barron, Paquito D’Rivera, Leo Kottke, and Sergio & Odair Assad.

After graduating Berklee College of Music in 2003, Tolling was recommended by Jean-Luc Ponty to join Stanley Clarke’s band. He has since been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his recordings have received rave reviews in Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Strings Magazine, and DownBeat Magazine. Tolling has performed for Danish royalty – Prince Frederik & Princess Mary – at the celebration of The Danish Embassy’s 50-year Anniversary. Since 2021, Tolling has been a member of Bob Weir & Wolf Bros project as part of the Wolf Pack with tours across the U.S. including at Red Rocks, The Greek Theatre, and Radio City Music Hall. He is also featured on Weir’s album Live in Colorado. Tolling has written several arrangements of Grateful Dead tunes for the band, some of which are now also part of the Mads Men repertoire.

Tolling now leads his own groups – Mads Tolling Quartet and Mads Tolling & The Mads Men. His release, Playing the 60s, is a reimagination of classic songs from 1960s film, TV, and radio, such as “A Taste of Honey,” “Hawaii 5-0”, and “Mission: Impossible.” The album features vocalists Kenny Washington, Kalil Wilson, and Spencer Day, and it spent two months in the U.S. Jazz Radio’s Top 30.

With his groups, Tolling has performed over a thousand concerts around the world, including at The Hollywood Bowl, the Library of Congress, and at the Bay Area’s Paramount and Herbst Theatres. As a featured Yamaha Artist, Tolling leads clinics and masterclasses in the U.S. and internationally.

Matt Eakle

Matt Eakle and his flute have been blowing crowds out of their chairs and onto their feet since 1989 as the first wind player to share the front line with David Grisman in the David Grisman Quintet (DGQ). He is featured on 14 albums with the DGQ, Jerry Garcia, Enrique Coria, and as the leader of his own jazz trio on the album, Flute Jazz. On these and hundreds of other recordings, Eakle takes people’s preconceived notions of what a flute can do and turns them inside out.

Since the beginning of his professional career in 1976, Eakle has performed in rock and jazz bands as well as symphonic, ballet, and opera orchestras. In 1978, he met San Francisco State University’s jazz guitarist and professor of classical guitar, Davis Ramey, and the two performed as a duo for 30 years. They added cellist Mark Summer of the Turtle Island String Quartet forming Trio Con Brio. The bandmates were known both as consummate jazz improvisers and interpreters of classical masterpieces.

Eakle appears on four albums with Jerry Garcia including the Grammy-nominated So What with Garcia and Grisman. His other Grammy-nominated albums include Simple Pleasures with banjo virtuoso Alison Brown and Dawg 90 with the David Grisman Quintet. You can also hear Eakle featured on Chris Isaak’s album, Notice the Ring, and on the bass flute providing a mellow setting for Bonnie Raitt’s Home. He has also performed with the mariachi group, Los Camperos, in Linda Ronstadt’s theatrical production, Mas Canciones de Mi Padre.

His ability to mimic the sounds of Japanese, Arabic, Native American, and East Indian flutes with the silver flute is unique. His note bending, growls, singing, percussive sounds, and circular breathing combine to create an alchemy which transforms the silver flute into bamboo, cedar, or ebony. You can hear this in his recordings with Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain, Japanese koto virtuoso Shirley Muramoto, Arabic percussionist Vince Delgado, and Pakistani singer Afqat Ali Khan.

His involvement in the fight to preserve the Headwaters Forest, a group of old growth redwood groves in Northern California, led Eakle to produce the Headwaters Project, a compilation of music inspired by the wilderness. Paul Winter, David Grisman, Zakir Hussain, Norton Buffalo, and Paul McCandless are just a few of the incredible musicians with whom Eakle collaborated on this project.

Eakle recently worked with Darryl Cherney as Musical Director of the documentary film Who Bombed Judi Bari?. His flute can also be heard in the critically acclaimed documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.