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There’s more than one way to play a violin and for its Holiday Extravaganza concert on Dec. 7, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra is showing how it’s done.
The concert is an annual event that features all of PACO’s youth ensembles. For the 2025 edition, music from Mario Bros., Tower of Power and other non-traditional tunes will share the bill with works by classical composers such as Johannes Brahms and Joaquín Turina. Grammy Award-winning jazz violinist Mads Tolling will be the featured guest artist, performing with PACO’s young musicians.
Bay Area audiences may have seen Tolling performing solo or in one of his projects, including Mads Tolling and the Mads Men, which focuses on 1960s jazz, soul, R&B and pop, and a recent collaboration with Melvin Seals, known for his work with the Jerry Garcia Band. He has also composed two violin concertos for the Oakland Symphony and can be seen this month in a holiday performance at SF Jazz.
PACO is an all-strings orchestra, with five ensembles of students who range in age from elementary school through high school. Their usual repertoire is primarily classical music.
“To do any of this music well, it takes a lot of focus, concentration, effort and commitment. And sometimes I think we look at pop music as — you know, it’s not a composition that’s the same as a piece by Brahms — but to do it justice and get the music to fly off the page, there’s a lot of charisma involved. Part of what these younger musicians are learning how to do is bring this music off the page and have your audience experience it. This genre of music allows them to really celebrate that as well,” said PACO Music Director Scott Krijnen.
Learning to play different genres of music can open up new possibilities for young musicians. Tolling, who began at age 6 as a classical violinist, discovered a life-changing love of jazz when he was 14, after his father gave him a Miles Davis cassette. He was won over by a sound that he describes as “really rich.”
“I came from classical music and going into jazz, listening a lot to Miles and (John) Coltrane, and learning the language of bebop, and then eventually also learning about fiddle music a little bit, and folk styles — to be able to recognize that and blend them together and borrow a little bit from everything,” Tolling said.
“What I went over with the PACO kids, we’re using rhythm techniques like the chop and shuffle bow that comes from bluegrass music, but they’re just rhythm techniques and groove techniques that you can use in any kind of music, including playing jazz. That’s fun for me to explore that and open that up for people so they can see the full range of what the violin can offer.”
For classical musicians, learning to focus on rhythm and groove can feel almost like starting an instrument from scratch, Tolling said, and he takes that approach in teaching new techniques to students, keeping it simple.
Many PACO musicians are around the age that Tolling was when he discovered jazz. If there was something he wished that he had known as a young musician, it’s that there’s no one certain way to play, and it’s more about playing what you believe in.
“It’s a lot about developing your tastes and your natural instincts and then responding to that,” he said.
“A lot of times, I think, certainly learning your instrument and learning the craft and the technique is key to being able to express yourself. But it’s also good while you’re doing that, to realize that you have all these options and you have this freedom.”
Tolling will appear in the Holiday Extravaganza’s second half, joining PACO’s young artists in performing a range of music, including some arrangements from his nine years as a member of the Turtle Island Quartet, a string ensemble known for its inventive fusion of genres.
“We’re going to be doing Mario Bros. theme song and Uptown Funk and Tower of Power, a couple of jazz standards. And we ripped through that the other night in that rehearsal. You just see smiles on the kids’ faces, because it’s not the stuff that we normally play,” Krijnen said.
The pieces are arrangements that Tolling has worked on over the years.
“I arranged (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s) ‘My Favorite Things’ for Turtle Island Quartet, which is more of an advanced kind of a chart. A couple of Turtle Island Quartet charts, ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ by Tower of Power and ‘A Night in Tunisia’ by Dizzy Gillespie, are a little bit more advanced jazz charts. So the reason why I came up with them (for the concert) was good variety, some fun tunes, some jazz tunes and fun video game tunes,” Tolling said.
“A Night in Tunisia” will offer some of the students a chance to improvise in a back-and-forth with Tolling.
The first half of the program focuses on the more classical side of things.
Middle-school aged performers, who particularly enjoy storytelling, Krijnen said, will perform “Perseus” by Soon Hee Newbold.
“If you get a piece that has clear characters, that really connects to where they are,” Krijnen said. “So performing a piece like ‘Perseus’ really allows them to express themselves.”
PACO’s Debut Orchestra, made up of young teen musicians, will play Durwynne Hsieh’s “Midnight Ride,” a piece that portrays a late night horse ride that Krijnen describes as “fast and exciting.”
In addition to performing with Tolling, the senior orchestra will perform Joaquín Turina’s La Oración del Torero and Brahms’ String Sextet in B Flat.
“It’s just this very fluid, very positive, very buoyant sort of piece of music,” Krijnen said of the Brahms piece.
The concert finale will feature all five ensembles performing together in a piece called “Santa at the Symphony,” which Krijnen compared to a mashup of the popular Mozart piece “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (“A LIttle Night Music”) with holiday standards.
PACO Holiday Extravaganza takes place Dec. 7, 3 p.m., at Smithwick Theatre, Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills. $25-$50. pacomusic.org.
