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Daniel Weltlinger

I'm an Australian born, Berlin-based jazz violinist, composer and producer.

About Me

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1977 and of French-Austro-Hungarian-Israeli family background, the critically acclaimed Berlin-based violinist and composer-producer Daniel Weltlinger has long been renowned worldwide for his distinctive warm sound and innovations within the genres of Gypsy-swing, jazz, Yiddish- klezmer and experimental/free-improvised music. He is frequently in demand in a recording or performance capacity, often in collaboration with an array of top musicians and ensembles in a variety of different formats, and is highly sought after for his technical and musical mastery on his main instrument. A graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he has performed and recorded in countless major concert halls, theatres, clubs and festivals across Australia, Europe, China, Morocco, Turkey, the US and Israel, and continues to collaborate with a wide range of renowned artists and ensembles including German-Sinti guitarist and composer Lulo Reinhardt along with members of the Reinhardt family based in Koblenz/Rheinland Pfalz, Berlin based Yiddish singer-actor Karsten Troyke and singer-actress Sharon Brauner, Polish-Australian singer Nadya Golski and her 101 Candles Orkestra, the Australian multi-ARIA Award-winning Gyp-rock band Monsieur Camembert and the Berlin based Turkish-Classical Ensemble Olivinn amongst many others. He runs the independent record label Rectify Records, which produced the album ‘Koblenz’ nominated as amongst one of the best albums of 2015 in Downbeat Magazine, and in addition to leading various combinations under his own name co-leads a number of ensembles including Gypsy-jazz collective ‘Radio Django’ with guitarist Janko Lauenberger, Hungarian Folk-experimental duo ‘The Huns‘ with bassist/multi instrumentalist Taylor Savvy, as well as two Australian based contemporary music projects ‘Zohar’s Nigun’ and ‘The Asthmatix’ with long-time associate keyboardist Daniel Pliner, which fuse Jewish music within the respective contemporary frameworks of jazz and electronica/hip-hop.

Weltlinger’s unique sound has been regularly featured on radio and television worldwide and featured on the award winning soundtrack composed by Nikko Weidemann and Mario Kamien for the hit TV show ‘Babylon Berlin‘ directed by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten which premiered in October 2017 on the Sky Television Network. Further film, documentary and theatre soundtrack credentials have included amongst others ‘Love My Way’ (Stephen Rae), ‘The Underpants’ (Alan John), ‘Uncle Chatzkel’ (Guy Gross), ‘Peking To Paris’ (Roger Mason), ‘The Cat That Walked By Himself’ (Peter Winkler) and ‘Meet The Waks Family’ (Neill Duncan). Weltlinger is endorsed by a number of top international companies and benefited in 2010-2017 from the support of BNP Paribas in Australia and the BNP Paribas Foundation in Paris for the development of a trilogy of recordings – ‘Souvenirs’ (2011), ‘Koblenz’ (2014) and ‘Samoreau‘ (2017) – in which he wrote original music and arrangements inspired by the music of the legendary Belgian born Manouche guitarist-composer Django Reinhardt. His latest album ‘Szolnok’ which in music tells the remarkable true story of his grandfather’s Hungarian violin generated a further sponsorship from BNP Paribas in Central Europe in late 2018, and was released on May 3rd, 2019. Weltlinger has further ongoing sponsorships with the Danish microphone manufacturer DPA microphones, US string instrument manufacturer Saga instruments as well as the Scottish acoustic amplification and electric violin manufacturer Skyinbow acoustic pickups, and is a co-composer with Australian producer-composer Bruce Maginnis for the international production music library houses Audio Network, Fable, Cavendish Music, The Funky Junkies, Intervox and Focus Music.

My Jazz Story

Excerpts from the back story of the violin from Szolnok: My beloved grandfather passed away in 1998 at the ripe old age of 96 and he played the violin literally until the day he died. It is was through my grandfather that I had the inspiration from a very young age to be a violin player. He had two violins: a violin from Szolnok that had been his brother’s who had passed away in 1918, as well as a Bohemian violin that my mother bought for him at an auction many years previously for a very cheap price. These violins were his babies. I’m not sure which violin my grandfather chose to play for the last time but he absolutely played one of these violins till the very end, serenading the patrons at a temporary nursing home he was put in for just the one night before he passed away shortly afterwards. After he passed away I inherited both his violins, but chose to play the Bohemian violin as this I preferred out of the two instruments as it has a sweeter tone and is a bit easier to play as opposed to the dark somber tone of the violin from Szolnok - which is a bit larger and more cumbersome to play. The violin from Szolnok remained in its case with the same strings on it for almost 20 years, before I took it to Europe with me in October 2017. My grandfather loved to serenade people – often with a bottle of Slivovitz, Pernod or Johnny Walker Black close at hand - and his style of playing was heavily influenced by the café orchestras he had worked in as a semi professional musician in France, where he had sought refuge in around 1922. I grew up totally entranced by both him and his violin playing, his smile and that twinkle in his eyes whenever he played is something that remains in my heart forever. He began in earnest to read Classical music at the age of 76, and would regularly meet with friends to play through various Classical chamber music works as well as occasionally do a small concert somewhere. He was often performing for people of his generation at a social club called ‘The Berger Centre’, and would practically every week go to the same violin shop ‘Irwin’s’ in Edgecliff, Sydney to get his violins checked, which he would endlessly be toying around with and adjusting. His choice of music he regularly chose to play ranged from light Classical pieces to some old love songs and standards to traditional Jewish and Gypsy music. I grew up with the story of my grandfather carrying his Szolnok violin by foot from Hungary to France - this was a story he told me in person - but the really nice thing was that there was very little to no sense of being too precious about this instrument. Aside from my grandfather’s fastidious tendencies to toy around with the bridge, strings, sound post etc of his violins, the violin case was always open. He would always take out a violin to play to serenade me, or my mother, or my brother, or various guests who came to visit - anyone. When I was 3 years old I heard the music from the very first Star Wars film, and somehow worked out how to play the main melody on the piano, without ever having played a note on this instrument. My parents realising that I had a natural musical talent insisted on me learning the piano, but I insisted on the violin heavily inspired by my grandfather. I took up the violin several years later at the age of 5, which my parents initially thought would be a short-lived choice of instrument to play. I finished my studies in Classical music in 2001 at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and although highly Classically trained I was from the outset first and foremost an ear player and was able to improvise from a very early age. I fell into bands quite by accident, initially as a result of a poster I put up searching for work in a Laundromat near where I was living at the time where at the last moment I added ‘band work’ to my musical capabilities. I was contacted by singer-songwriter Yaron Halis – recently at the time arrived in Sydney - who I worked with for several years in various formations until we co-created the popular ‘Gyp-Rock’ band ‘Monsieur Camembert’ which I still continue to guest with on occasion when I am back in Australia. Alongside this seminal group, from the early years of my tertiary studies onwards I ended up playing in countless different musical projects – many of which stylistically and culturally related to what I was brought up with within my family – and a lot of what I would learn over the years to come was on stage ‘on the gig’ through years of playing music with more often than not older more experienced musicians in a variety of different contexts and formations. From around the end of the 1990s I studied in my spare time some elements of jazz and jazz improvisation, and in the process became very fond of mixing jazz and improvised music together with traditional music – which to this day still remains my musical preference. I tend towards music that relates – even if very subtly - to who I am or what I have experienced, although the music I compose and/or play pretty much spans all styles of music. In Europe I have long been performing with and closely associated with members of the Reinhardt family based in Koblenz and Rhineland Pfalz, as well as members of quite a number of other Sinti families as well as musicians dedicated to Manouche or Gypsy jazz music from across the continent. My close relations with the Reinhardt family stem from meeting guitarist Lulo Reinhardt in 2002 in Sydney while he was on a short tour, at a tiny art gallery run at the time by artist Kathy Golski, who is the mother of singer and close friend of mine Nadya Golski. Lulo and I made immediate friends when we met, and he invited me to visit him and his family in Koblenz several years later, which I accepted. Upon arriving in Koblenz in 2004 I felt from the first moment like I was visiting my own family and I was treated as one of their own, which to this day I have never ever forgotten. In the same year previous to visiting Koblenz I met a number of other Sinti musicians as well as made friends with a number of people from across the world, when I stayed at a small camping place in the village of Samoreau, several kilometers away from the world famous Festival Django Reinhardt located south of Paris close to Fontainebleau. These initial encounters prompted an annual pattern for several months of the year in the summer months where every single year I would go back and forth all the way from Australia to Europe to spend time in Koblenz and Samoreau, visit relatives and friends on the continent as well as tour and perform intermittently with Lulo in various formations in particular his ‘Latin-Swing Project’. Although my family are not Sinti, over the years it does seem like there are more than just a few passing cultural similarities, and my instinctive feeling is that there is more than likely to be a connection somewhere down the line although our ethnic and religious-cultural identity is Jewish. I naturally play a lot of Jewish music and can play klezmer, Yiddish music and music from Central Europe and the Balkans, and have been known over many years for my work with a number of highly respected musicians working within these genres both in Australia and Europe. Important to mention firstly is that almost every single one of the musicians I have long been associated with I came across completely unintentionally or by accident over the years - almost as if by some strange hand of providence every single time. Secondly is that elements of the basis of my style and sound of violin playing borrows heavily from my grandfather’s style and sound of playing, which at times was really not too far away in sound and feeling from violinists like Stephane Grappelli, mixed together with the classic Hungarian restaurant violinist style and sound one can still find today in many places in Budapest. My grandfather was a big fan of the Hot Club de France with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and had seen concerts of theirs back in the day. He had also been friends with many people from the artistic scene in his adopted home of France in the 1920s and 1930s - including Edith Piaf amongst others - so it probably goes without saying that his violin playing would have been influenced by some of these artists, and undoubtedly affected by his work in the café orchestras he worked in as a semi-professional musician during this time. In the beginning of April, 2013 I moved to Berlin, off the back of a tour I took part in the previous year with the irreverent, off-the-wall-anything-goes klezmer-hip-hop band ‘The Asthmatix’ that I continue to play in with two of my closest friends from back in Australia pianist/keyboardist Daniel Pliner and turntablist Micha Walter. The area of Berlin that we stayed in for several months – Wedding – really appealed to me with it’s extremely laid back feeling and slow pace, and I really liked the musicians and artists who I met during this time and remain close to. Today I live in Krezuberg, and as well as being a very convenient and practical city for me personally to live in, Berlin happens to be the only city in the world that has my late father’s adopted family name of ‘Weltlinger’ on a street (Weltlingerbrücke in Charlottenburg, named after Siegmund Weltlinger who was a relative of my late father’s adopted father, who was a founding member and first Jewish president of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Berlin from 1949 to 1970.)