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Transylvanian Dance Jazz Concert

WHEN: October 9 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm WHERE: Good Shepherd Center
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. Within a decade he transcribed thousands of melodies, recording hundreds of folk musicians on wax cylinders and would call the completion of his research into Romanian folk music, as “my life’s goal”.  Transylvanian music reflects a European cultural melting pot in a region inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Slovaks, Roma, and other ethnicities. Bartók did his best to faithfully transcribe folk music to reflect the sounds of the cultures he studied, but his work was undoubtedly shaped by his own experiences studying the works of Western composers such as Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Brahms, and Strauss. By exploring the connections between folk music and Western classical music, and expressing his respect for both, Bartók provided a broad framework for Romanian-born, New York-based pianist Lucian Ban and American violinist-viola player Mat Maneri , as can be heard on their recent second duo album, Transylvanian Dance (ECM, 2024). Ban and Maneri find new inspiration when they follow in the footsteps of Béla Bartók and rediscover the folk music that stirred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer in the early 20th century, who collected and recorded so many Transylvanian pieces. “For our duo, these songs have become a ‘source of song material and a springboard’ for transcriptions that preserve the original spirit, while allowing us to improvise and bring our own world into it. Digging deeper into the original material opens up new horizons. These folk songs have much to teach us.” (Steve Lake, liner notes on the Transylvanian Folk Songs album) . We are proud to organize this concert as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival. 
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Lucian Ban

Lucian Ban (1969) – Romanian-American jazz pianist and composer, grew up in a small village in Transylvania, the region where Bartók did his most extensive research and collected folk songs. He studied composition at the Bucharest Academy of Music (1992-1995), then founded his band Jazz Unit in 1995, which released two albums on the Romanian label Green Records. His improvisational style was influenced by Romanian modern classical composers such as Aurel Stroe, Anatol Vieru, and George Enescu. Lucian Ban represents the stylistic ideal of modern chamber jazz. From the beginning, he has been fond of using Transylvanian folk music in his works that cross classical music and jazz, in which improvisation is also a key player. The influence of jazz brought him to the United States, where he moved to New York in 1999. Many excellent New York musicians have played in his orchestras. His album Enescu Re-Imagined , which celebrates the music of the great Romanian composer, has won the Best Album of the Year award several times. He has been working with American violinist Mat Maneri since 2009. In 2020, they made the album Transylvanian Folk Songs – The Bartók Béla Field Recordings , a reimagining of Béla Bartók’s Transylvanian recordings, with John Surman, one of the key figures in European jazz. This album received significant international attention and numerous awards. In 2023, Ban and Maneri released thealbum Oedipe Redux on Sunnyside Records, a radical reworking of George Enescu's opera Oedipe , featuring a collaboration with internationally renowned contemporary jazz and improvisational musicians. In 2024, Sunnyside Records released the albumBlutopia , a collaboration between baritone saxophonist Alex Harding and Lucian Ban's quintet, Mat Maneri, Brandon Lewis, and tuba master Bob Stewart. Lucian Ban's first solo piano album, "Ways of Disappearing," was released in 2022, a collection of original compositions and hypnotic improvisations that received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Downbeat, and the New York City Jazz Record. As a bandleader, he has recorded twenty albums for major labels such as Sunnyside, ECM, and Jazzaway. www.lucianban.com

Mat Maneri

Mat Maneri (born 1969) is an American composer, violinist, and violist; he is the son of saxophonist and clarinetist Joe Maneri, born in Brooklyn. He began playing the violin at the age of five, but after borrowing a viola for a jam session at the ECM Festival in Badenweiler in 1998, it became his instrument of choice. As a young musician, Maneri was influenced by the sounds of his childhood. His father, Joe Maneri, was a professor at the New England Conservatory, and his colleagues Ran Blake and Gunther Schuller often visited them. Maneri's work was significantly influenced by Baroque music, the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), and the American modernist composer Elliott Carter. Mat Maneri is the leading improvisational performer of his generation, the most unique and compelling musician, with an instantly recognizable sound and approach that merges the diverse worlds of jazz and microtonal music in a fluid, expressive way. According to All About Jazz, “Mat Maneri has changed the way the jazz world views the violin and viola.” In 1990, he co-founded the legendary Joe Maneri Quartet, featuring his father, drummer Randy Peterson, and bassists Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. The band has been widely acclaimed by critics and fellow musicians alike, and is considered one of the most important developments in 20th-century improvisational music. Since then, his long list of musicians has included icons such as Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Paul Motian and William Parker, Joe Morris, Vijay Iyer, Matthew Shipp, Marilyn Crispell, Joelle Leandre, Kris Davis, Tim Berne, and Craig Taborn. Mat Maneri @ ECM