Album Notes

Trio Bravo+: Visionary Sound presented Live

The melancholy Slavic soul meets western grooves. Four classically trained musicians who came from the Ukraine, Poland, and Italy to Berlin and Hamburg are what make up Trio Bravo, and that’s the reason for the plus in the name. In spite of having an instrumentation that smacks of „chamber music“, they effortlessly break through any and every known boundary in the world of sound. Trio Bravo+, founded in Berlin in 1994, have shown on their five albums released to date just how to stir klezmer, chanson, and gypsy music with classical and rock into an unbelievably tasty mélange.

On their first live album, that is also available as DVD, recorded on November 25th, 2005 in Dortmund’s Dietrich Keuning Haus, Mark Chaet (violin), Sergej Sweschinskij (contrabass), Giorgio Radoja (piano) and Adam Tomaszewski (drums, marimbaphone) show that they don’t need a fancy light show or visually vamped performance art to enrapture their live audiences with their songs. And so the quartet presents a highly concentrated and powerful concert.

The sound is excellent and perfectly aligned, so that the listener can linger undistracted on the precise and soulful playing of these four musicians. In the interaction between violinist Mark Chaet and Giorgio Radoja on piano, bassist Sergej Sweschinskij and Adam Tomaszewski (drums) join in with a lot of pizzazz, so enlivening the play between comical effortlessness and an energetic speed rush.

The irrepressible lust for playing is evident in every note. With rapid tempo changes, furious solo interludes and rhythmic precision they delve into everything between folk and rock, klezmer and chanson, mazurka and Balkan sounds.

The cd contains the full concert with all in all 18 tracks, among them such poetic titles as "Weißes Akkordeon“ („White Accordion“), the musical countryside depictions of "Rondo Ukraine" and "Fernes Irland" (Faraway Ireland), as well as the revolutionary sounding "Panzerkreuzer Potemkin", all penned by composing team Chaet /Sweschinskij, leave nothing to be desired as far as rhythmic and melodic sophistication goes. They are as seductive as a summer day and as refreshing as a breeze from the sea. With their penchant for crossing musical borders, Trio Bravo+ are simply unstoppable, on stage, or anywhere else.

Summary
Trio Bravo+ are quite idiosyncratic – as much in their musical direction as in their stage presence. Playing with the speed and force of a rock band and performing with the demureness of a chamber music quartet, they present themselves on their Live CD as a worldly combo with a lot of heart and all kinds of grooves, stopping at literally nothing in the world of music.