Toots Thielmans is my all-time favorite musician in all categories. He says it all. He is a beautiful soul. I got to meet him a couple of times and I also had the pleasure of singing with him. (Editor’s note:  Toots Thielmans is a Belgian Jazz guitarist and harmonica player.)

Then of course Nils Landgren, who is my mentor and he has produced almost all of my albums. We have been on hundreds of gigs together and he is also a very dear friend.

Viktoria Tolstoy’s debut album Smile, Love and Spice (1994) was comprised of songs with English lyrics and her second album För Älskad (1996) was an album with entirely Swedish songs. Even though Swedes are taught English in school from a very early age, we wondered if it had posed a challenge for Viktoria Tolstoy at the beginning of her career when she was singing in English and for to grasp the various nuances of a phrase or word.

“It was nothing that I thought about much at the time. I just sang it, but now twenty years later and listening to some of my old recordings from a long, long time ago, I just think oh my God, do you know what you are talking about girl? I am like oh; didn’t someone tell you how to pronounce that word? Small details I can now understand and that I didn’t understand at the time when I was young. I thought it was easy and I thought it came naturally. I love singing in English, because it is so much easier to sing beautiful and you can paint the words,” she says. 

Tolstoy’s current album is called A Moment of Now, released in 2013 and it was recorded with composer and pianist Jacob Karlzon. The album is Viktoria Tolstoy’s most musically diverse album to date. A sampling of the songs that populate this album include, “Against All Odds,” (Phil Collins), Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard’s “Hand In My Pocket,” Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate On You,” “Send One Your Love,” (Stevie Wonder) and Pat Metheny and Anna Alerstedt’s “A Moment Of Now.”

Tolstoy talks about selecting the songs, “I didn’t really think that I should take this song from that artist. It wasn’t really calculated. I took the songs that I love. It was oh my God this is Michael McDonald, so it is okay. Then it just became this mixture of everything. I have a very broad taste in music and I always listen to a lot of different styles and genres. It reflects my music tastes and Jacob and I have played together for twenty years, so it is really a magical album. We have this telepathic thing going on between us. It is totally free, just Jacob and me. That is why it makes it special, because some of the songs are really well-known. It is fantastic. It is my magic, magic moment.”

Viktoria Tolstoy’s Swedish roots go back several generations, but if you have been wondering about her surname, while you have been reading along, she is the great-great granddaughter of the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina).

Tolstoy says, “I was born in Sigtuna and I grew up in Uppsala. Sigtuna is a very small and a cozy city. It is an old city and I grew up there for my first ten years, before moving to Uppsala, which is a university city. It is also very beautiful and it is a very old city. I had my most important years there from ten to twenty, when everything happens in life that you think is important. I have one brother and one sister, but they are both ten years older, so I was not really hanging out with them. It was like I was an only child, since I was so small. For most of the time it was just my mom and my pop and me. Then from Uppsala I went to live in Stockholm and I now live in Limhamm (near Malmö in southern Sweden). It was love that brought me here (She is married to drummer Rasmus Kihlberg).

In describing her childhood, Viktoria Tolstoy says her mother was the one who provided more structure or discipline in her life, while her father was the one who was freer, cooler and looser.  

“I needed my mother (in order) to have balance in my life. She was good for me and she gave me a lot of love. That is a good thing. You need someone to do that. My mother and father were both academics. My father was a professor of music and my mother was a doctor,” she says.

Tolstoy laughs lightly when reminded of the recordings she made as a child. “I think that I was two or three. It was like this, only when I was at home and I did it for myself, but not seriously. I recorded myself with a small tape recorder. I have it all,” and when joking asked if she came out of the womb ready to sing she replies, “Yes that is pretty well how it was. All of my girlfriends wanted to do other things and I said the only thing I wanted to be was a singer. It has always been my first choice. 

I have been singing every day since I remember and that was my way of training. It was to sing and to listen to music all of the time and to have my own opinion about things. I believe either you can sing or you can’t. It feels quite difficult to learn how to sing. For me it comes from another world. It comes from inside the soul and the heart. It is not about technique at all. That thing doesn’t really exist for me. It is only a feeling and it is only to open my mouth and to see what happens,” she says, while laughing lightly.

When asked about her father’s Jazz background as a musician and composer Tolstoy says, “He was more on a hobby level, because he had his regular day job and he is still on a hobby level. Now since he has retired he plays more than ever and he has started a small club in Stockholm. He jams with (different) people many nights each week. We also do some gigs together now. He plays the vibraphone and he sings. He is great. We do duo things and it is really fun to do. We also play the older songs and the music that he wrote for me and that I never do with anyone else, but my father. It is a lot of fun to do that with my father from time to time. The vibraphone works so well with the voice. It is really matching, so perfect.”

About her musical education when she was in her teens, Viktoria Tolstoy recalls, “I went for two years to a music gymnasium (Swedish word for school) when I was 15 and 16, in Uppsala. Once a week, we had to go to this woman who (taught vocal lessons) and she was the one who told me you have to take away that leak in your voice. (Her voice becomes more direct now as she remembers saying) Don’t touch my voice, because that is my personality. She didn’t really understand that. She was from the Classical world and they have a different way of singing. I can understand her, but it was wrong for me.”

People in the music community were already starting to notice Viktoria Tolstoy, while she was still a teenager.

“I was fifteen or sixteen when I did my first studio recording for one song, but still it was during school time and I had to say I am leaving class and I am going to the studio for a recording. People thought that was really something. In those days, all of those kinds of things were so unique. Now you can record anytime, anyhow and anywhere that you want. It is very easy now with Youtube and everything, but that was really special.

My father and I started playing out together when I was around sixteen in a club in Uppsala. There was a well-known club in Uppsala called Katalin. It is a very nice place and it still exists. That was when I was around eighteen. I was discovered from the audience. There was this record manager who heard me and he asked me if I wanted to do a Jazz album. It was the old fashioned way. I was okay, why not? Let’s do it. That was how it all started for real. I was still in school, so it was directly from school that I graduated and then I was out into the big, big world,” she says.

When the album Smile, Love and Spice came out in 1994 Viktoria Tolstoy was reunited with her father Erik Kjellberg who played vibraphone and he also wrote some of the songs for the record.

“I was thinking okay, I am doing this album for me now and nothing is going to happen. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was, let’s record these songs and I took it quite lightly. They were great (musicians) and the bass player Sture Åkerberg played with Monica Zetterlund (Swedish Jazz singer who worked with Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Quincy Jones) for many, many years. He is very famous and he is a really great bass player. They were great musicians, so I was in good company. (Editor’s note: Monica Zetterlund and Sture Åkerberg were married from 1974 to 1983.)

When my first review came out it was in the biggest newspaper here in Sweden and it was on the cover. I was what? I was so shocked. I honestly didn’t think that anything would happen and I didn’t think anyone would care. I was almost one of the first Jazz singers in that age. It was big news. She is only nineteen and singing Jazz. It was of great interest and now there are thousands of nineteen year olds (she starts to laugh) singers popping up all of the time. At that time it was a big thing.

The all Swedish album För Älskad was released in 1996 and it was Viktoria Tolstoy’s first recording with a big label. The song “En Bra Dag (A Good Day),” is more light Pop with Jazz influences and Tolstoy’s vocals are beautiful and the musicians superb.

“För Älskad had a Jazz flavor. It was a little bit Disco Funk, Jazz and a mixture of everything with Swedish lyrics. That was with a big company and my first album was on a small label. Then huge EMI came and took me from them! (Said humorously) It was almost like that. We did it with quite well-known writers who wrote music for me to have a go.