Gunhild Carling, the Swedish queen of jazz, is getting to know her new home in California.

Gunhild Carling hasn’t played Monterey Jazz Festival “yet,” she says, even though, in many ways, she belongs in this most famous festival, especially now that she can call herself a Californian.

Still relatively unknown in the U.S., this Swedish trombonist, composer, singer and dancer enjoyed a long and successful international career before she moved to Northern California in 2018. While the family (her husband and two children) explored living in the U.S. for the first time during the pandemic, Carling fell in love with her neighborhood – filled with good vibes and music.

“Everybody is so nice,” she says of Cupertino, where the family moved after her husband got a job developing audio and video solutions on mobile platforms. “This is such a great community.”

Originally from Gothenburg, on Sweden’s West Coast, Carling was born to a family of jazz-obsessed performers, in a house where one “just picks up an instrument and starts to play,” she says. Her father, Hans Carling, was a trumpet legend in Sweden, and Gunhild (an Old Norse name common among Scandinavian queens) soon picked up trumpet, trombone and then bagpipe, piano, drums, harmonica and vocals.

The Carling family has morphed into Gunhild Carling and Carling Big Band – with one brother on clarinet and violin, the other drums and trumpet. Add to it a sister on piano, daughter on trumpet, mom on banjo and niece on saxophone, and you will have a sense of Carling family life, where music and life – jazz and vaudeville – become inseparable.

Part of the appeal of the Carlings is the universality with which they approach music and performing – they are as eager to play from the American songbook as they are to compose themselves or even jazz up some hits currently promoted by radio stations. If you think you don’t like swing, try listening to Carling performing ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Do the same if you like jazz, but dislike ABBA – it’s hard to dislike Gunhild Carling.

Asked if she would wish for her children to continue with the family profession, Carling says she wouldn’t mind at all.

“I would like that,” she says. “It’s a wonderful career, full of adventures.”

GUNHILD CARLING performs at 5pm Sunday, Oct. 16. Paper Wing Theatre, 711 Cannery Row Suite I, Monterey. $69-$99. 905-5684, paperwing.com