In 2018, violist and composer Mat Maneri enlisted a quartet of longtime collaborators to assist him in creating a trilogy of albums with an overarching tone. He enlisted pianist Lucian Ban with whom he’d been collaborating since 2013, drummer Randy Peterson, a colleague since 2000, and bassist John Hébert, a partner since the 1990s. The quartet released Dust in 2019. The first of three recordings for Sunnyside, it offered a moody, atmospheric chamber jazz meditation on grief. The group returned with the ephemeral Ash in 2023, using the loose framework of jazz, improvisation, and chamber music to gauzily highlight themes of loss and grief. Mist concludes the trilogy, offering tentative possibilities for hope in the etheric present and future.
Tag Archive: Mat Maneri
Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have been playing Transylvanian-tinged music together for 15 years, the last half-decade with reeds master John Surman. The trio’s latest release, Cantica Profana – as well as a companion album, The Athenaeum Concert – shows the three improvisors at the top of their form. The collaboration began with 2020’s Transylvanian Folk Songs, a set of tunes based on field research of Bela Bartók. Bartók’s recordings include thousands of melodies, which Ban and Maneri whittled down to just a handful. Most of the ones they chose were originally played by violin, flute, and bagpipes, an orchestration not impossibly distant from the contemporary group’s combination of viola, saxophone/clarinet, and piano.