Photo by Antonio Porcar Cano
Mat Maneri -viola
Lucian Ban -piano
Brandon Lopez -bass
Randy Peterson -drums
Mat Maneri envisages his music as one of activity in stasis, or motion within stillness. His music continues from the lineage of master improvisers Paul Bley and Paul Motian (with whom Mr. Maneri has played in the past) with a sound that is distinctly his own and developed over decades of discovery and practice. Following his acclaimed 2019 ‘Dust’ album, Sunnyside records announces Mat Maneri’s – ASH – the second installment from his trilogy for quartet. The new recording showcases his stirring playing in a program of open-ended compositions that showcase his unique marriage of jazz and microtonal music alongside an ensemble of modern master improvisers: drummer Randy Peterson, pianist Lucian Ban, and bassist John Hébert. If a certain elusiveness permeated the first album, “Dust”, with ASH comes the permanence of memories burned into the mind, of songs triggered by scenes past from decades before, of what poet Denver Buston, who penned poems for each track on the album, calls “all that's left is this what was once something before it was ash”
Watch Mat Maneri Quartet
From the first piece, its title track, the album explores extending the boundaries of what you can create in, of how various sources - a viola sonata from Brahms, a motive from an improvisation by Joe Maneri, or a Sicilian lullaby - can be filtered through a certain microtonal group approach to push the parameters of what a jazz quartet can do today. Silence and memories can be equal sources to create music in the moment with both poetic imagination and a narrative sense within an improvised performance.
Over the course of a twenty-five year career, Mat Maneri has defined the voice of the viola and violin in jazz and improvised music. Born in Brooklyn in 1969, Maneri has established an international reputation as one of the most original and compelling artists of his generation, praised for his high degree of individualism, a distinctive marriage of jazz and microtonal music, and his work with 20th century icons of improvised music. As young musician, Maneri was influenced by the sounds of his childhood home. His father, saxophonist and composer Joe Maneri, was on faculty at the New England Conservatory, and colleagues like Ran Blake and Gunther Schuller were frequent visitors. Important influences on Maneri’s work – in addition to all the major forces of jazz – include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and educator Joe Maneri. Of his studies with Koff, Mat Maneri has said: “Studying Baroque music helped me to find my sound. [Koff] brought me into the world of contrapuntal playing and a way of using the bow that sounded more like a trumpet, like Miles, to my mind.” Jazz writer Jon Garelick has written of Maneri’s distinctive style: “Maneri’s virtuosity is everywhere apparent – in his beautiful control of tone, in the moment-to-moment details that unfold in his playing, in the compositional integrity of each of his pieces, in what visual artists might call the variety of his ‘mark-making’: spidery multi-note runs, rhythmically charged double-stops and plucking, subtle and dramatic dynamic shifts.”
”Mat Maneri has changed the way the jazz world listens to the Violin & Viola” - All About Jazz
Maneri posses an immediately recognizable sound and approach which marries the distinct worlds of jazz and microtonal music in a fluid, remarkably expressive fashion which The Wire dubbed “endlessly fascinating.” In 1990, Mat co-founded the legendary Joe Maneri Quartet with his father, drummer Randy Peterson and bassists Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. The quartet’s recordings for ECM Records, Hatology and Leo Records were widely acknowledged by critics and fellow musicians as among the most important developments in 20th century improvised music. Maneri’s 1999 solo debut on ECM Records marked his emergence as a musician with a singular, uncompromised voice, reflecting a growing consensus of Maneri as a central figure in American creative music. Since then, the long list of musicians with whom he has worked includes icons such as Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Paul Motian and William Parker, as well as influential bandleaders such as Joe Morris, Vijay Iyer, Matthew Shipp, Marilyn Crispell, Lucian Ban, Joelle Leandre, Kris Davis, Tim Berne and Craig Taborn. More info at Mat Maneri @ ECM
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