Transylvanian Dance Jazz Concert

Join pianist Lucian Ban and violinist Mat Maneri for a special multimedia jazz concert on October 9 at the Good Shepherd Center.

Drawing from their acclaimed new ECM Records release Transylvanian Dance and from NPR Album Of The Year Transylvanian Folk Songs featuring legendary woodwind player John Surman pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri reimagine through improvisation the Béla Bartók Field Recordings of folk songs from Transylvania using live performance along with video projections featuring rare archival footage, audio from Bartók’s original wax cylinder recordings, handwritten manuscripts and photographs taken by Bartók himself in his field trips.

“It is such a joy for us to use varied folkloric approaches from around the world - all filtered through our love of improvisation and the jazz vernacular - to dig deeper into these folk songs and find the notes that bring out the heightened emotions of all folk music. All these are illustrating Bartok’s profound idea of a „connective tissue” that ties all folk musics around the globe, a connection based on what he calls the „brotherhood of peoples”. Music always represents more than just the song itself. Folk music, folk art is a container of a communal culture. And even a hundred years later, long after the peasants sang into an Edison phonograph we partake in this culture, in its beauty and mystery. Improvising in the moment also includes our personal history and experiences and through the audiences we play in front of, it includes our collective history too.”

- Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri, 2025

Transylvanian Dance @ ECM Records

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).

Developing the music from the Transylvanian folk transcriptions has become a priority in recent years, with both players finding new freedoms in the material. On the present album, Mat Maneri, taking heed of Bartók’s observations about the “connective tissue” linking the musics of the world, subtly draws influence from Arabian, West African and Korean music as well as from the richly divergent folk sources of Transylvania in his uniquely liquid viola playing. 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.

About Lucian Ban & 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 Târgu Mureș 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”.

Lucian Ban (piano) Mat Maneri (viola)

Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri performance and presentation are part of Retracing Bartók – Reimagining the Béla Bartók Field Recordings project supported by The Tulipán Foundation.