Daniel Erdmann - Message in a Bubble (2023)

Velvet Revolution, the nearly ten-year-old jazz band has been the most successful group on the BMC label for the last decade, with two previous albums that won a great deal of German and French awards.
Daniel Erdmann has nurtured a close and intense relationship with BMC Records for a long time. He is featured on Aki Takase's side on three albums – Japanic (2019), Isn't It Romantic? (2021) and Carmen Rhapsody (2023) – with a follow-up already planned with the second recording by Japanic. The improv album by the trio of Vincent Courtois, Daniel Erdmann and Robin Fincker was also released this year. Erdmann's new trio, the Organic Soulfood will also present their debut album on BMC Records.
But the saxophonist's most successful and longest-running group is Velvet Revolution, whose members come from three different nations but are all based in France and have toured across Europe. Their debut album, A Short Moment of Zero G (2016) received top ratings in the French Citizen Jazz and Jazz Magazine, made its way on the Best of list of both the New York City Jazz Record and the German Record Critics, and went on to win the German Jahrespreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (Best Album of 2017). In the same year, it also won one of the jazz world's most prestigious awards, the Echo Jazz Award. With their second album in 2019 (Won't Put No Flag Out), the triumph continued and Daniel Erdmann was honoured with the German Jazz Award.
As we have come to expect from Erdmann, the album Message in a Bubble is once again reflecting on a typical issue of our time. It deals with the experience of loneliness, which everyone has encountered with varying degrees of intensity during the pandemic, and which modern man has faced before and since. Their music is not a cry for help, however, but expressing hope that honest dialogue and togetherness are still possible today. It is surely no coincidence that it is here that the three members of the trio reach full equality. Théo Ceccaldi and Jim Hart played a much larger role in the improvisations on the second Velvet album than before, but now they are the composers of six out of the nine tracks on the album. The organic community of the trio thus also opens up space for the musicians' independence to flourish: Daniel Erdmann exudes a heartfelt tone, Théo Ceccaldi showcases playfulness and Jim Hart brings the complexity of contemporary music to its peak.