Sunday Sessions #14 – Workshop med Mat Maneri & Lucian Ban

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(English below)

Sunday Sessions afholder endnu en workshop!

Denne gang har vi fået pladeaktuelle Mat Maneri (violin) og Lucian Ban (klaver) til at lede workshoppen.

Begivenheden er gratis og åben for alle, men det kræver tilmelding med navn og instrument til sunday.sessions.koncertkirken@gmail.com

Efterfølgende vil der være koncert med Maneri og Ban + kvintetten Estuary
Du finder linket til koncerteventet her: https://fb.me/e/1Pr4ATwdk

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Sunday Sessions er arrangeret i samarbejde med KoncertKirken og støttet af Københavns Kommunes Musikudvalg og Dansk Artist Forbund

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English

Sunday Sessions is organizing another workshop!

This time it is with violinist Mat Maneri & pianist Lucian Ban, who just released their new album Transylvanian Dance

The workshop is free and open to all, but requires registration with name and instrument to sunday.sessions.koncertkirken@gmail.com

Afterwards we will continue with a concert from Mat Maneri & Lucian Ban + the quintet Estuary.
You can find the link to the concert here: https://fb.me/e/1Pr4ATwdk

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Sunday Sessions is in collaboration with KoncertKirken and is funded by Københavns Kommunes Musikudvalg and Dansk Artist Forbund.

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Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri – Transylvanian Dance:

On their second ECM duo album Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and US violist Mat Maneri find fresh inspiration as they follow the trail of Béla Bartók, revisiting the folk music that spurred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer who, in the early 20th century, collected and transcribed numerous pieces from Transylvania. For the duo these songs have become “springboards and sources of melodic material” for arrangements “that capture the spirit of the original yet allow us to improvise and bring our own world to them. If you go deeper into the source material, new vistas open up. These folk songs teach us many things.” (Steve Lake, album liner notes). Recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing Bartók project in Timișoara, these performances also bear testimony to the finely attuned understanding that Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have achieved in their long-running musical partnership.

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.
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.

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.

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.
Jazz writer Jon Garelick has written of Maneri’s distinctive style: “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.”
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. More info at Mat Maneri @ ECM

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.
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. More info at www.lucianban.com