Daniel Weltlinger Quartet - Szolnok (2019)

The album Szolnok by the Daniel Weltlinger Quartet tells the very special and very personal story of a violin that guides the listener through time and across the continents. It is the story of an escape, an arrival and a return.

But one by one: the Australian violinist Daniel Weltlinger moved to Berlin in 2013. At some point he had the desire to found a jazz quartet under his name. The comrades soon found their feet: Uri Gincel on the piano, Mathias Ruppnig on drums and Paul Kleber on bass. Daniel Weltlinger says of his selection, "My reasoning for choosing Uri, Mathias and Paul to create this quartet has to do with their truly open sense of sound, which is when they can play outside of a conventional style of music and have creative freedom which are exactly what these guys are capable of. "

In 2016, the first idea for a joint album about the violin of Daniel Weltlinger's grandfather Zoltan Fyszman and his extraordinary life story was born. The album title Szolnok came naturally, as the violin was built in this Hungarian city and also Weltlinger's grandfather was born there; In addition, the name of the city is immortalized in it.

Through the turmoil of world history, the violin began a world tour in the luggage of Zoltan Fyszman: from Hungary on foot to France, across Morocco to Australia, where he died in 1998 as "Zoltan Fishman" at the age of 96 years. Until the end he was still playing his violin. His grandson inherited them from him and brought them back to Europe on October 11, 2017, and only two days later she heard a version of the German national anthem performed together with a Turkish ensemble at Schloss Bellevue as part of a concert for the Federal President.

Weltlinger's original idea was an album full of pieces that Zoltan Fishman played on the violin throughout his life. At the end of 2016, the idea developed into an album that uses music to tell the story of Zoltan and his violin, their survival. The first piece, with its open string tuning, is inspired by the sound of a clock and, with its slow but steady rhythm, stands for the time so defining for the album. This is followed by a tribute to the original owner of the violin, Zoltan's brother Ernő, who died in 1918 of the Spanish flu; a reference to Brahms' Violin Concerto can be heard here - it was the last piece played by Ernő before he died. The jazzy track "1921" with its dark and brooding Hungarian-Romanian bass line and its spooky violin tremoli evokes the long, always exposed footsteps of Zoltan and two friends on the way from Hungary to France, fleeing from the social and political political turbulence in their homeland, and in search of a country that would take them.