The violist and his band continue to defy easy categorization as they draw from their varied pasts and mesh genres from classical to Eastern European folk, producing novel results. Larry Blumenfeld
Mat’s deepest memories are buried within particular musical phrases or renditions. One track here, “Brahms,” is based on the Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Viola Sonata No. 1, Op. 120, as Mr. Maneri remembers it played by violist James Bergin, who studied with his father. The brief yet dramatic phrases that form the basis of Mr. Maneri’s “Earth” were drawn from a 1964 “Peace Concert” by his father (in duet with drummer Peter Dolger), which Mr. Maneri listened to obsessively on a reel-to-reel tape (it was commercially released in 2008).
Mr. Maneri is one of modern music’s most distinctive string players, and one of its freest-ranging talents. He has played with past masters including pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, and is an essential element in several important groups (pianist Matthew Shipp’s String Trio, including Mr. Maneri and bassist William Parker, is a singular and wondrous ensemble).
If his playing knows no genre and often defies standard notation, it’s because he was raised in the spaces between those styles and notes. Joe Maneri’s music and scholarship placed modern jazz, composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School, and Eastern European folk styles on equal footing; his abiding fascination was with microtonalism, music that uses intervals smaller than the semitone, the smallest by Western music standards (and which occur naturally in most folk music and blues). The quartet Mat played in and assembled in the 1990s for his father to lead focused on, he told me, “pitches within pitches, rhythms within rhythms, dynamics within dynamics.”
That same sense of granular expression, of continuums rather than fixed points, animates Mr. Maneri’s current quartet, which made its debut on his 2019 release, “Dust.” These musicians now mine their own communal memories. Mr. Maneri began playing with Mr. Peterson in the 1980s and with Mr. Hébert a decade later. His close bond with Mr. Ban, who was born and raised in central Romania, began in 2010, and includes their 2013 duet recording, “Transylvanian Concert.”
On the new release Mr. Ban’s composition “Dust to Dust” extends his “Mojave,” from Mr. Maneri’s previous recording, into a 10-minute-plus piece; Mr. Maneri plays its bittersweet melody with brilliant clarity and complex shades of feeling. For his own composition “Cold World Lullaby,” Mr. Maneri draws upon three references: Sol Kaplan’s score to “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (a favorite film of his childhood); a Sicilian lullaby his grandfather taught him; and “Lume, Lume,” a traditional Romanian song he learned from Mr. Ban. On another original composition, “Glimmer,” Mr. Maneri’s viola often sounds like a horn in a jazz band—a quality that he said owes as much to his studies of Baroque music with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff as to his listening to Miles Davis recordings. It also results from the way he combines his instrument’s natural qualities with deft use of amplification and a volume pedal.
In Mr. Maneri’s hands, the viola is both acoustic and electric; each tone is neither this note nor that; his quartet, which sometimes sounds larger than it is, mostly moves as one; and his music speaks simultaneously of a distant past and a present moment.
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