Wojciech Pacuła
Translation: Krzysztof Kalinkowski

Lars Danielsson was born in 1958 in the Swedish Göteborg. He received musical education in the Music Conservatory in his home town – in the cello class. Besides this main instrument he also plays contrabass and electric bass, and piano (and that beautifully). The basis for Danielsson, as a composer and musician, is the (founded in 1985) Lars Danielsson Quartet, where, besides the piano player Bobo Stenson and the legendary drummer from the ECM stables, Jon Christensen, also David Liebman played – the saxophone player of Miles Davis. Danielsson was also a conductor and composer of the Jazz Baltica Ensemble. Since 1980 he recorded nine albums, solo and with his quartet, four of them in the ACT music company, where he debuted with the disc Libera Me. He found his home there, so he is a frequent guest on discs from many renowned artists, either as one of the main players, or only as a band member.

In Poland, not dismissing his earlier work, he is best known from his collaboration with Leszek Możdżer on the disc Pasodoble. Everything depends on the point of view – when I talked with the representatives of ACT Music+Vision, the “home” company of the musician, they were enchanted, what wonderful, yet unknown, piano player Danielsson found... But to the point – the duo Danielsson and Możdżer prepared a disc in 2008, which simply enchants – with melody, fluency, harmony, etc. Maybe the technical solutions are not most inventive, but this actually helps in listening to music, without the need to engage the analyzing circuitry. A year after the success of that disc Danielsson issues another disc with Możdżer, Tarantella, but this time him being in the accompanying band. Almost all pieces were composed by Lars, with the exception of Fiojo, by Możdżera and 1000 Ways, where the whole band is noted as authors. The band is composed, besides Możdżer, by the trumpet player Mathias Eick, known from his lyrical approach to the instrument, John Parricelli, known for his passion of do fusion, and who played with musicians like Colin Towns and Django Bates, and the drum player Eric Harland, the most surprising person in this set, the sideman of Charles Lloyd, McCoy Tyner, and from ACT known from the collaboration on two projects of Rigmor Gustafsson. So we can immediately expect different playing than on the Pasodoble.

Artists Web page: LARS DANIELSSON

SOUND

The piece opening the disc, lyrical, somewhat melancholic Pegasus „sets” its sound. This is a nice, coherent production, with the warmth typical for ACT. This is confirmed by Możdżer’s piano opening the second piece, Melody On Wood. It is a bit muted, I mean, its “soft” elements were exposed. On the other hand Danielsson’s contrabass is quite hard, although also without a well defined attack. It seems to be done on purpose, what makes the leader to be audible even with the other players. When he plays solo, like from the half of the second minute of Melody… its sound opens a bit and gains breath. The cello from Traveler’s Wife fits in the same scheme. The reverb is significant, but noted mostly in the lower parts, without the high frequency “boost”. This gives a big, massive sound of this instrument. And this is every time so.
This is undoubtedly a well thought production, inviting to a longer stay in a warm atmosphere. It visibly has the role of enhancing the music, which melancholic beauty is floating above that all. When the brass opening the piece Traveler Defense - actually a part of the Traveler’s Wife - bring some air, it has not much in common with what we were used to with for example ECM discs. And this is how it is for a longer time, it seems to be a completely different aesthetics. But after some time, the fullness of the timbre, its multi layer nature, allow to look at that from another perspective: this is a sound complimentary to the music, and very close, in terms of category I would call “truthiness”, to ECM productions. The tools are different, it is much warmer here, and the mid bass has much more to say, but the effect is very similar. The sound stage is not very worked out, and rather limited, coherent than big. There is no precise pointing to the places the instruments are in. But there is intimacy and palpability. This can be, for example, perfectly heard in the piece Introitus, where the harpsichord is much closer than in the classical music recordings, and has a broad perspective, being treated as an instrument giving the rhythm, like a percussive instrument. Yes, I know, that this instrument is part of that group, but usually its nature is hidden.
The disc is very easy to listen, despite it is not the summit of resolution and neutrality. Like I say, it lacks a bit of resolution and madness. But still, a music lover will have a hard time to explain, why he hasn’t Tarantella on his shelf. Because it opens bit after bit, a piece after a piece, revealing something new during each listening to it, things that you could swear, were not there before.

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