Drawing from their NPR Album Of the Year Transylvanian Folk Songs featuring legendary reeds-man John Surman and their new ECM duo release Transylvanian Dance pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri will reimagine through improvisation the Béla Bartók Field Recordings of folk songs from Transylvania using the unique acoustic possibilities of the National Sawdust space to bring back to life century old songs using live performance, audio from the original Edison wax cylinder recordings, rare handwritten manuscripts and photographs taken by Bartók himself in his field trips.
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Lucian Ban, piano
Mat Maneri, viola
The 20th century Hungarian composer Béla Bartok loved the folk music of Transylvania in western Romania. He famously experienced an epiphany in 1904 when he heard an 18-year-old woman singing songs from her Transylvanian village and was soon on the road in search of more music. Between 1909 - 1917 he transcribed thousands of melodies, recording hundreds of folk musicians on wax cylinders and would call the completion of his research into Transylvanian folk music, as “my life’s goal”. The profound knowledge and beauty of these ancient folk songs will also change forever his compositional vision.
A century later, two outstanding improvisers – violist Mat Maneri and pianist Lucian Ban – draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartók’s imagination, looking again at carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more through their unique duo sound and improvisatory concept.
ABOUT LUCIAN BAT AND MAT MANERI
More than a decade since they started working together as a duo, Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri are renowned for their amalgamations of Transylvanian folk with improvisation, their mining of 20th Century European classical music with jazz, and for their pursuit of a modern chamber jazz ideal. The two musicians first worked together in 2009 in the Enesco Re-Imagined octet that was conceived as a celebration and a contemporary jazz re-imagination of the works of the great Romanian composer George Enescu. Featuring an A list of jazz musicians – Ralph Alessi, Tony Malaby, John Hebert, Gerald Cleaver, Mat Maneri, Albrecht Maurer and Indian tabla legend Badal Roy – the album was recorded live at the 2009 Enescu International Festival in Bucharest and won multiple BEST ALBUM of the YEAR Awards from Jazz Journalists Association and worldwide press coverage, followed by concerts in major venues and festivals. JAZZ TIMES said “Enesco Re-Imagined is visionary third-stream music . . . this recording places Ban and Hébert among the great 21st-century interpreters.” The Guardian hails the album’s “rare combination of uninhibited but coherent solo and collective improv, shrewd arrangement and dazzling thematic writing”.
In 2013 ECM Records releases Maneri & Ban duo album Transylvanian Concert that was widely acclaimed for “its original voice and unorthodox beauty “(The Guardian) and spanned worldwide touring. It was followed by a trio with European avant-garde icon Evan Parker (Sounding Tears, 2018), by Mr. Maneri’s own microtonal quartet Dust (2019, a ROLLINGSTONE Best of the Year) and ASH (Wall Street Journal feature) and in 2020 by their radical recasting of the Transylvanian folk songs from the Bela Bartok Field Recordings with legendary reed player John Surman. By year’s end Transylvanian Folk Songs ends up on NPR 2020 Jazz Critics Poll , on Balkan World Music Charts, New York City Jazz Record BEST OF 2020 and more. In 2023 Ban and Maneri released on Sunnyside Records Oedipe Redux their radical take on George Enescu’s Oedipe opera featuring a cast of international celebrated contemporary jazz & improvisers – Jen Shyu, Theo Bleckmann, Tom Rainey and renowned French bass clarinet player Louis Sclavis. In 2024 Sunnyside Records released Blutopia, a co-lead quintet by baritone saxophonist Alex Harding and Lucian Ban and featuring Mat Maneri, Brandon Lewis and tuba master Bob Stewart.
The duo first appearance on ECM was in 2013 when Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri joined up for a concert in an opera house in Targu Mures in the middle of Romania’s Transylvania region, and recorded Transylvanian Concert, an album featuring a program of self-penned ballads, blues, hymns and abstract improvisations, the whole informed by the twin traditions of jazz and European chamber music. The music was, as Jazz Times puts it, “as close as it gets to Goth jazz” and won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, including several Best Album of the Year awards, and spawning continuous touring ever since. Transylvanian Concert @ ECM Records
Their previous investigation of the Béla Bartók field recordings with legendary British reedman JOHN SURMAN produced the acclaimed Transylvanian Folk Songs album and was, as JAZZ TIMES put it “as much an act of tribute as it is a transformation”. The album quickly to Billboard charts, European Jazz Media Charts, Balkan World Music Charts, New York City Jazz Record BEST of 2020 and was named an NPR 2020 Jazz Critics Poll album. Rave reviews followed - the WIRE describes it as “Lush and romantic, with each note placed as carefully as a stone”, Deutchlandfunk Radio called the album “A magical event”, and the Financial Times talks how “Village dances with a fresh spin -jazz, folk and classical influences merge into a singular jazz voice”, and NPR describes the “mystery in that bare-bones music and in much else on the album”. Discussing with Berlin Jazz Festival their investigation of folk music of Romanian people Mat Maneri talks about the “spirituality of these peasants that speak through music and how he loves this the most” while Lucian Ban underlines how “observing the traditions of folk music can teach us so much about improvisation and ultimately about music and life”.