It all started with three guys and their acoustic guitars banding together to pool their collective stories into one epic tale. Like the bards of old who wove their experiences and anguish into works of art, Johnoy Danao, Ebe Dancel, and Bullet Dumas has done the same in modern times. And it is all for the love of their craft. Pure unadulterated love. Of all the instruments made by man, there’s no instrument more primal and simpler than the acoustic guitar. In its own, it’s a tool to deliver the user’s emotional quandaries. Married with the unmistakable voices and exceptional lyrics of Danao, Dancel, and Dumas, it becomes magic. It becomes an experience.
As individuals, they’ve played in pubs, seedy bars, coffee shops, makeshift tents, stadiums, and gymnasiums. They’ve shared their magic and music to people. They have brought delight to fans everywhere. As the collective known as “3D: Danao, Dancel, Dumas,” they’ve united every ounce of their magic and turned it into what can only be described as a profound spectacle. 3D: Danao, Dancel, Dumas became a concert tour that has led them to often packed shows all over the Metro, as well as in Singapore.
The trio celebrated a full year of touring with the sold out Dama: Johnoy Danao, Ebe Dancel, Bullet Dumas First Anniversary Concert on February 19, 2016 at the famed Music Museum. Proudly produced by Vandals On The Wall and Gabi Na Naman Productions, to say that the concert was a massive success is an understatement. Backed by the four piece Manila String Machine and Nikki Cabardo on keyboards, 3D more than dazzled the capacity crowd with their hits and songs that made the fans love their music.
If you’ve been a constant fixture of their shows, you’d notice that the three seem to bring out the best in each other. “When you surround yourself with brilliant musicians, you have to at least hold your own,” Johnoy Danao said when I pointed it out. He adds, “Unconscious ‘competition,’ as I call it.” That “unconscious ‘competition’” can be felt in the concert, as Danao and the two others laid everything on the table.
What was to be on the table that night was all contained in one single word. It was the in the title of the concert: Dama.
Feel. The three can be considered as experts, generals, in the battlefield of feelings. With their delicately crafted songs, they’ve fought, and are still fighting, all sorts of emotions both onstage and offstage. It was a downpour of feelings and emotions all through all throughout the night – a downpour that the audience danced under in.
Each member made the audience part of their world. They showed more than a glimpse of their very cores.
The youngest and greenest of the three, Bullet Dumas, who for the first time stepped on his biggest stage yet, electrified the crowd with his narratives and lessons learned from unrequited love. Dumas goes from a whisper to ferocious scream, serene weather to a sudden summer storm, in under a second with his songs that became loud professions of love and longing. His eccentricity and “Hugot King” persona drew the audiences’ attentions in. He, for all intents and purposes, had the audience in the palm of his hands for those 45 minutes that he was onstage. With the way he took a moment to absorb everything in before he exited the stage, he was the rookie no more. He became a superstar in a constellation of guitar wielding wordsmiths who inspire the next generation to follow their dreams.
Read on for more!
