Jean-Luc Ponty Legacy Concert
Jean-Luc Ponty
Image courtesy of the artist
The Jean-Luc Ponty Legacy Concert will celebrate the storied career of one of the most influential figures in the contemporary string world. The concert will take place on Tuesday, September 29, which coincides with Jean-Luc Ponty’s 84th birthday.
Featuring all-star faculty, alumni, and students from the string department (led by Chelsey Green, Jason Anick, and Jeremy Harman), Berklee World Strings, guitar, piano, percussion, and bass departments, this concert will highlight the extensive and profound career of a true jazz legend.
With special guest Mads Tolling, an internationally renowned violinist and composer from Copenhagen, Denmark, now based in San Francisco. A former nine-year member of both bassist Stanley Clarke's band and the celebrated Turtle Island Quartet, Tolling won two Grammy Awards and earned a third nomination in 2015, along with the 2016 DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star Violin Award. He has performed with Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Kenny Barron, Paquito D'Rivera, Leo Kottke and Sergio & Odair Assad, and is a current member of Bob Weir's Wolf Bros & Wolf Pack Band, touring at venues including Red Rocks, The Greek Theatre and Radio City Music Hall.
After graduating Berklee 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, praised in the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, and twice commissioned to write violin concertos, for the Oakland Symphony and Pacific Chamber Orchestra.
He now leads his own groups, the Mads Tolling Quartet and Mads Tolling & the Mads Men, and has performed over a thousand concerts worldwide, including at The Hollywood Bowl and the Library of Congress.