Lucian Ban/Mat Maneri - “Transylvanian Dance”
Wednesday, October 1 at 7:30 PM
TIckets are $20/Person and available here
Presented by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares
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.” Recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing Bartók project in Timișoara, their second ECM release, Transylvanian Dance, these performances also bear testimony to the finely attuned understanding that Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have achieved in their long-running musical partnership.
Ban and Maneri have collaborated for over a decade and a half, with the last few years dedicated to exploring a microcosm of Bartók’s thirty-six hundred transcriptions of Transylvanian folk music. The duo treats the composer’s work on each piece with admiration and appreciation but does not feel bound to his written notes. Songs are opened up for moments of improvisatory ingenuity, which allow for the incorporation of not only elements from their backgrounds in jazz and free music but also their shared interest in folk music from around the globe. The latter is particularly fascinating as the smooth melding of these ideas with traditional Transylvanian folk music suggests a cross-cultural thread that ties all “music of the people.” No matter the barriers between people, humanity and shared emotions transcend it all.
Tickets and more information are available here: https://www.jazzshares.org/events/lucian-ban-mat-maneri-transylvanian-dance