Velvet Revolution
Daniel Erdmann_tenor sax
Theo Ceccaldi_violine
Jim Hart_vibraphon
Daniel Erdmann’s Velvet Revolution – Message In A Bubble
Message in a Bubble – of course, the onomatopoeia-like hit by Gordon Sumner immediately comes to mind, whose bass figure prompted Gil Evans to collaborate with the (then still, albeit already infected with the jazz virus) rock musician in the late 1980s. Sting’s hit told of a man stranded on an island who throws a message in a bottle into the sea to ward off his loneliness. Hoping to make contact with the outside world. One morning, after more than a year has passed without an answer, he comes to the beach and finds countless bottles with messages addressed to him. The key line of the song lyrics: “Seems I’m not alone at being alone”.
This is where Daniel Erdmann attacks: The ‘Velvet Revolutionaries’ set a sign of hope against the loneliness experienced to the core (in various gradations) at the time of the pandemic. It is not an ‘SOS’ that emanates from Velvet, but the hope for an end to aloneness, for exchange, for togetherness. Hope that the ‘bubble’ will break open – not only in the pandemic sense. Reasonable scepticism in view of the extra-
musical reality included. Daniel Erdmann always makes the general visible in the obvious, in the individual and the particular.
The trio – Daniel Erdmann, Theo Ceccaldi and Jim Hart – lives this togetherness: since its formation in 2015/16, it has organically developed into a band in which the whole is more than the sum of its individual parts. Although it is entirely Daniel Erdmann’s project, Theo Ceccaldi and Jim Hart have clearly ’emancipated’ themselves over time. This already became clear on the recordings for the second album with the greater improvisational share of the two. The same continues here. In addition, they each contribute three compositions to the nine tracks on the CD. This is something that has been Daniel Erdmann’s concern from the beginning. If there is one quality – apart from Daniel Erdmann’s highly rated musical abilities as a player, composer and arranger – that can be described as his strength, it is this: He is able to make ‘his’ musicians better in the sense that they let his project become theirs, internalise the sound he had in his ear when he once set out to find the musicians with whom this sound could become reality.
What emerges; an intense and dense interwoven music-making, a somnambulistic certainty of response, a deeply soulful give and take.
It is the gesture, the closeness to language, the narrative and rhapsodic manner that first makes you sit up and take notice and that draws you in. Daniel Erdmann’s pieces are compact, sometimes even complex, and within their forms the participants can move freely. The themes, both musical and intellectual, form the frame of reference. Daniel Erdmann is an avowed melodist. And that is often much harder than hiding behind a material exegesis, because the ideas and the statements have to be strong. In this web of voices with violin, viola and vibraphone, he weaves a trio that allows the parts to share rhythmic or harmonic aspects, to overlap or develop.
