It was in 2022 that Jazzahead! asked me to put forward a musician for a Franco-German project for the Year of France at Jazzahead in 2023. We agreed fairly quickly on the name of Daniel Erdmann. He was German, and he lived in France. I had been following his projects for about fifteen years, if I remember rightly. 

Although over the last few years Daniel Erdmann’s projects were essentially centred around small ensembles, this time the goal was to bring together a sextet. The choice of musicians grew out of the way Daniel imagined their sound. An orchestral sound, with a mixture of bowed string instruments and reeds, in low and medium registers, based on a stable and mellow rhythm. This instrumentation makes it possible to work in layers, harmonic, melodic, or in counterpoint, both at the same time.

At the beginning of the project, no role was defined in advance for the instruments. Although the initial impulse was to compose one piece for each instrument, the choice of musicians finally gave rise to a much more blended writing, a convolutedness that also leaves room for spells of time in suspense, for images that fade once they have been revealed.

Listening to the album, the lived-in polyphony towards which we slide from the opening, mixing the reeds and the bowed strings, immediately gives the colour of the project. The sound of the tenor sax glides on high, within it, there follows a succession of questions and answers, and rhythm sets in. Who makes the rhythm, who brings the colour? Daniel Erdmann’s writing goes deep, and the musicians improvise in it. Construction and deconstruction: we think of Berlin, a city on the move, its facades that often conceal hidden courtyards with cats stretching out, while birds sing very early. Joachim Kühn said that the birds sang louder in the East.

We reel from one song to another. From one world to another. The ensemble’s soloists get to grips with this material thoroughly. Each one plays and deepens the open trails with the brilliance for which they are known. An ensemble is born. A Franco-German ensemble that questions its identity.

The evocation of the song Göttingen by French singer Barbara (who later recorded a German version), and of Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust from Goethe’s Faust, speak of a mirror held out to either party, German and French, in which each seeks their own reflection. Who are you, deep down? I shall attempt an answer in the form of a question: do you not feel in my songs that I am one and double?Goethe studied law in Strasbourg between 1770 and 1771, though he would have preferred the University of Göttingen, but he wanted to perfect his French.
The story continues.

Philippe Ochem
Former Director of Jazzdor
President of the Orchestre National de Jazz of France