LUCIAN BAN & MAT MANERI

LUCIAN BAN 

Called “A name to watch” by The Guardian and ”one of the most gifted pianists to move to New York” (B. Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery), Lucian Ban is a Romanian born, NYC based pianist & composer known for his amalgamations of Transylvanian folk with improvisation, for his mining of 20th Century European classical music with jazz, and for his pursue of a modern chamber jazz ideal. His music has been described as “emotionally ravishing” (Nate Chinen, New York Times/WBGO), a “triumph of emotional and musical communication” (All About Jazz), “Unorthodox but mesmeringly beautiful“(The Guardian) and as holding an “alluring timelessness and strong life-force” (Downbeat Magazine). Ban was raised in a small village in northwest Transylvania, in “the region where Bartok did his most extensive research and collecting of folk songs” and studied composition at the Bucharest Music Academy while simultaneously leading his own jazz groups, and notes that his approach to improvisation has been influenced by “the profound musical contributions of Romanian modern classical composers like Aurel Stroe, Anatol Vieru and of course Enesco”. Desire to get closer to the source of jazz brought him to the US, and since moving from Romania to New York in 1999 his ensembles have included many of New York’s finest players. The Enesco Re-Imagined third stream extravaganza octet celebrated the music of the great Romanian composer George Enesco and won multiple BEST ALBUM OF THE YEAR Awards. His second album with ELEVATION quartet  “Songs from Afar” featuring Abraham Burton (ts), John Hebert (b) and Eric McPherson (dr) won a DOWNBEAT “5 star” review and BEST ALBUM OF THE YEAR in 2016. His duet with violist Mat Maneri “Transylvanian Concert” was released by ECM Records in 2013 and won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, including several Best Album of 2013 awards. The 2020 Transylvanian Folk Songs featuring Mat Maneri and legendary John Surman re-imagining the Bela Bartok Field Recordings is an NPR Album of the Year and wins critical acclaim and international coverage. 2022 sees the release of his first piano solo album, “Ways of Disappearing”, a mesmerizing collections of improvisations and originals that is reviewed glowingly in The Wall Street Journal, Downbeat and New York City Jazz Record . He has recorded 20 albums as a leader for labels such as Sunnyside, ECM, Jazzaway, etc.

MAT MANERI

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. All About Jazz considers

”Mat Maneri has changed the way the jazz world listens to the Violin & Viola” 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, clarinettist, 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” 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, Joelle Leandre, Kris Davis, Tim Berne and Craig Taborn.