Gideon Freudmann
CelloBop
I am very excited to announce the upcoming release of my newest recording, Flying Cars. The official release date is July 1st - and that's when it will become available on various streaming services.
But for, you, my dear dedicated readers (and some of you have been reading these missives for decades!) I am pleased to announce you can get your very own physical copy of the CD right now at my website shop
I've recorded a series of duo albums in recent years and I am overdue for a solo release. My fans have been hounding me - ok, one fan. I can't wait for you all to hear what I've concocted.
This album was recorded during the pandemic. Touring was on hold allowing me time time to dig deeper into studio work.
Regarding the album title: I've been waiting for flying cars my whole life. When I was a kid I was assured they were coming. I see now that the people who said that were not in a position to make it happen - they were merely expressing a belief or a wish or perhaps only a fleeting thought. But the idea captured my imagination and stuck with me. This album and its title, Flying Cars, is a nod to holding on to memories and dreams, and acknowledging the incredible inventions that come our way, from without and within, even when they take a form we hadn't anticipated. Ideas, like dreams and technology, take on a life of their own and transport us to unexpected places. Climb into your flying car, have a listen and enjoy the trip.
Nowadays its hard to to know what something sounds like if you don't know what it looks like. That statement is patently false, but hey, videos can be entertaining. Mark Roessler created this particularly fun video for the title track - which is set to premiere at this Thursday, June 9th!
Check out the video, share it, feed the algorithm, and buy the album!
On July 1st, I have a CD release concert at Dancing Fish Vineyards in Freeland, WA at 5:30 pm.
The venue boasts great acoustics, delicious wine and tasty nibbles. The early hour (5:30pm) means you can get here on the ferry and then make your way back home (to Seattle or NYC or Nepal) in time to tuck your kids in (or, if you're old, tuck yourself in) before the sun sets.
tickets: Dancing Fish
Last month I did a silent film show accompanying Sherlock, Jr. Here is a 4 minute sequence in which the protagonist (who is dreaming) enters a film and finds himself in a bizarro series of unrelated settings - as happens in a dream. It is a cinematic achievement and wonderfully weird sequence. Now consider that I was being filmed while playing along to this film-within-a-film and we're spiraling into an uber-meta experience.
One more entry about the new CD because - it's a NEW CD. I'm pumped! Albums have liner notes - the good ones do anyway. In addition to credits, it's an opportunity to give the listener a little something more to savor and perhaps gain a little insight. This was penned by my exceptionally literary poetic friend and former student, Djelal Kadi, mid pandemic 2021:
I never cease to be amazed by the peculiar lessons of this cello's language that proves more eloquent than my now labored attempts to string a sentence together having gone still going for days without speaking with anyone. It says strange things this cello to wit Orpheus must have been drunk when he invented the octave with seven notes and started repeating himself with a slightly more shrill tone. And though he played the lyre he must have been yearning for the cello rising up as he did by falling down the finger board in his inebriated reverie. And he must have been possessed of prophetic prescience in foreseeing the flow of time he called tempo as the stream of a river the river that would carry his severed head still singing after the drunken maenads tore his body to pieces and strewed it about in repeating patterns they called rhythm. They answered the replicant echoes of their whooping and called it counterpoint. They whispered in conspiratorial tones and named them harmonics. My cello says to listen to Gideon and play around with the scales slur and tie climb down to go up and up to go lower cross strings and violate freely their Euclidean parallels press the bow on more than one string at a time and call it double stops even though there is no stopping but go straight across with the bow even though it's called a bow but is straight nonetheless. And so with all its resonant contradictions the cello seems to manage to escape the fate of soliloquy and of sonic solitude. Which tells me that perhaps I should endeavor to sound off like my cello become the reverberating sound box that solitude hallows out and not worry about the paradox of a sound-filled silence and the oxymorons of mute loquacity. So back to my scales now without getting snagged by the perplexities of why we begin ascending rather than descending as if we are perpetually re-enacting a fate that has us always starting to scale up out of a hole only to return to where started.
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