Lucian Ban/Mat Maneri
Transylvanian Concert
ECM ****
This unusual piano-viola duo album recorded in Romania by a pairing also known as Deco Heart channels serialism, an abstract often achingly-plangent wash of bittersweet registers, and naturally conceived improvisations. Ban, who moved to the US from his homeland of Romania in the late-1990s a decade after the country’s hated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were shot dead by firing squad, got to hear his future playing partner at the Vanguard in New York when Maneri was performing there with the late Paul Motian. Ban and Maneri started to work together for the pianist’s Enesco project, issued in octet form on a Sunnyside album called Enesco Re-Imagined. But for this album they travelled to Targu Mures in Transylvania for the pianist’s first outing, a live affair, although it sounds more like a studio album despite the discerning applause. There’s an aching sadness on a tune such as Maneri’s ‘Retina’ with Maneri outgrowing his instrument on his own tune, and indeed both players follow an organic compositional, often orchestrated approach by extension. It’s the nature of the big sky songs on this fine album. Ban has a pointillist barrelhouse touch when he frees himself up on ‘Not That Kind of Blues’ and you instinctively believe in his solos. Most of the tunes are the pianist’s own with the traditional ‘Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen’ and some hymns at the end the additional well integrated elements.There’s a coming together of many influences on this album, a synthesis if you like of Schoenberg, advanced contemporary classical music, much Ellington and Gershwin-derived jazz, and the hinterland of Ban’s belovèd Enesco. But the improvisational spirit, beginning at the crossroads of the free jazz revolution and Nicolas Slonimsky’s theoretical influence on John Coltrane by the early-1960s, is at the album’s core. MB
Lucian Ban above left and Mat Maneri. Photo: Claire Stefani/ECM
Transylvanian Concert is released on 13 May. Hear the Ban/Maneri duo at the Vortex, London on 21 May; Voice Box, Derby the next day; and Newcastle university on 23 May