Bartók Lives: Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri's "Transylvanian Dance"

The October 1st Jazz Shares concert at the Northampton Center For the Arts, featuring Lucian Ban (piano) and Mat Maneri (viola), was not only a transcendent musical and visual experience, but a history lesson and a testament to the human urge to preserve and celebrate cultural expression. Dubbed “Transylvanian Dance”, the concert drew from the groundbreaking work of Béla Bartók, the Hungarian composer who recorded and transcribed thousands of folk songs from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa beginning in 1904.

The program of songs were augmented by visuals projected on a large wall behind the musicians.  They included Bartók’s still photos of people and their villages, his schematic drawings of the dances, his written transcriptions of the songs, as well as song lyrics and vintage videos of dancers, all in a series of gorgeous black and white images that moved and faded into one another. Throughout the performance we also heard a number of field recordings made by Bartók, preserved on wax cylinders using his Edison phonograph. Ban and Maneri brought life to the images, providing a soundtrack to the lives we glimpsed. Using source material gathered long ago and far from here, the musicians seemed to be in improvised conversation with the visuals behind them. Special thanks to Jason Robinson, who flawlessly ran the projections.

The evening began with archival audio. (Wax cylinder technology meant recordings topped out at just over a minute.) Maneri entered from the side, playing along with the melody. Ban soon joined him on stage and they transitioned to “Lover Mine of Long Ago”, accompanied by images that began with a photo of a woman, who was so strong and beautiful it took my breath away. As her face moved close-up, this nameless woman, who reappeared throughout the evening, looked straight at the camera, unflinching in the face of the new technology.

“Transylvanian Dance”, performed without projections, was next. Aided by a rollicking left hand piano figure, Maneri made the folk melody soar, before the two of them bee-lined to the 21st century in improvised flight that never lost sight of the tune’s framework.

From the stage, Ban and Maneri spoke with passion and authority about Bartók’s work and the importance of the culture he preserved. One point they made, which they reiterated in later conversation, was about the universality of folk music. Of course there is great variety and regional difference, sometimes even from county to county. But the impulse to sing and dance, subjects like love and sorrow, and the scales, melodies and treatment of the music itself, is shared across the world. Maneri, who is conversant in American blues, Arabic, North Indian, and Greek music, shared his surprise when he discovered the striking similarities between sounds made by people from disparate parts of the planet.

Mat Maneri is one of the more interesting figures in creative music. Matthew Shipp called him “one of the five greatest improvisers on the planet.” His mentors, his father Joe Maneri and Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff (with whom he studied for over 25 years), provided him with a firm background in microtonal music from around the world, as well as Baroque and modern classical forms. Through his father’s long teaching career at the New England Conservatory of Music, Mat was immersed in the place. Ran Blake, Gunther Schuller and countless students were frequent guests at the family home.

In the 90s, Mat reinvigorated his father’s performing career by organizing and playing with him on recordings for ECM, Leo and hatART, now acknowledged by critics and fellow musicians as among the most important developments in 20th century improvised music. Mat told me the only poster he has in his home is of his 2004 UMass duo concert with his dad. His playing on Wednesday was exquisite, especially when he was barely touching the strings. His control of tone and the variety of what visual artists call ‘mark-making’, made clear that Shipp’s pronouncement was not hyperbole. His ingenious placement of a compact mirror on his viola case allowed him to see the projections behind him.

Lucian Ban was raised in a small village in northwest Transylvania, in the region where Bartók did his most extensive research and collecting of folk songs. Since 2013, when he and Maneri released Transylvanian Concert (ECM), Ban has continued his deep dive into the subject matter. He was granted full access to the Bartók archives in Budapest and permission to use his photographs in performance and on the packages of recordings. The duo’s two latest recordings on Sunnyside, Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert, both featuring the great 81-year old British reedman John Surman, cover more of these preserved folk melodies. Ban and Maneri both marveled at the ease with which Surman interacted with the songs, and they expressed gratitude for the opportunity to have performed with him over the last five years. Ban’s piano was the rebar that supported Maneri’s flights of fancy. His technique of reaching into the keyboard to dampen the strings produced a marvelous variety of textures.

I’m thankful Ban and Maneri are shining a light on the world Bartók preserved. Acknowledged as the father of ethnomusicology, Bartók believed that music that was “pure”, or only one thing, is never as rich as music that mingles. Jazz is a living entity precisely because it is open to deep exchange with a wide variety of sources. Ban and Maneri are living it.