Carla Wilson, Bassoon

Born in Martinez and raised in Concord, Carla Wilson has been steeped in music from her earliest days. Her mother was a professional banjo player and fronted a group called Banjos U.S.A., in which her dad was the bass player. Carla took up the auto harp in the third grade and soon added piano and tenor sax to the list of instruments she played. When her school band needed a bassoonist, she says, “I was handed a bassoon and took it home. I didn’t know what it was.” After learning the basics at a summer school program, she started playing in the band in the seventh grade and never looked back.

The band director at Mount Diablo High School was longtime Oakland Symphony trumpet player Tony Caviglia, and Carla credits him with inspiring her to take music seriously. Caviglia, a Juilliard graduate, “was hard core,” she observes. She played bassoon in the band and orchestra, sax in the jazz band, and accompanied the choir on piano. On concert nights, she says, she would spend the evening running from one group to another. Meanwhile, she helped pay for her bassoon lessons with San Francisco Symphony bassoonist Walter Green by teaching piano. “I was a total nerd,” she remembers. “I practiced so much on piano and bassoon that my parents had to tell me to stop so they could go to bed.”

But it wasn’t all music all the time, and she also took up the unicycle and joined the Concord Unicycle Club, where she fondly remembers a choreographed performance set to “12th Street Rag” by the Tijuana Brass.

Carla played in three regional youth orchestras, performing the Mozart Bassoon Concerto with all three. She toured Europe three times before she graduated from high school, performing the Mozart with the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London. She also won the San Francisco Symphony’s Pepsi Cola Young Musicians Award and an International Festival of Youth Orchestras scholarship to study for six months in London with bassoon legend Archie Camden.

But, she says, the London experience was very isolating, and after returning from London, she enrolled at San Francisco State and nearly quit the bassoon. Nevertheless, soon she was back on track with a full scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and spending her summers at the Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals.

Carla started playing with Berkeley Symphony in 1981 and says she often finds it “magical.” The rehearsals can be long, she observes, “but Kent helps us dig deep to our deepest resources, and some of the Berkeley concerts have been the most exciting experiences I’ve had in my career.” A highlight of her time with the orchestra was her 1998 appearance as soloist in Ross Bauer’s Icons for Bassoon and Orchestra.

In addition to Berkeley Symphony, Carla is principal bassoon with the Santa Rosa and Marin symphonies and acting principal of the California Symphony. She frequently performs with the San Francisco Symphony and many other groups and has done a good deal of recording at Skywalker Ranch.

Her sons Isaac (bass) and Nick (violin and guitar) are also musical, and Nick is applying to Oberlin to study music. When not playing music, Carla enjoys Buddhism, yoga, and hiking. Last year she packed up her unicycle and attended Burning Man for the first time, and she’s working on her juggling with an eye to joining the Berkeley Unicycle and Juggling Group. Meanwhile, she’s branching out in her musical interests by picking up the sax again and joining a rock band.