CD ECM Records Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Mat Maneri: Three Man Walking

1996

Joe Maneri - clarinet, saxofon alto si tenor, pian
Joe Morris - chitara electrica
Mat Maneri - vioara electrica cu 6 corzi

The father and son team of microtonal master and multi-reedist Joe Maneri and violinist Mat Maneri are joined by guitarist Joe Morris in this free ranging collaboration. The group embarks on a cross-cultural journey which explores jazz, chamber music, and collective improvisation. On this album Maneri/Morris/Maneri offer a a strangely poignant, deeply poetic music with a phraseology and dyamnic sense all its own.

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The liner notes that accompany Three MenWalking provide a full account of Maneri's history. To recap briefly: he was born in New York in 1927 and became a professional jazz musician at 15. In the mid '40s, while part of an experimental 12‑tone improvising group, he met the exiled Austrian composer/conductor Josef Schmid, a pupil of Alban Berg and an associate of Schoenberg who was to be his mentor for more than a decade. Maneri subsidized his studies with Schmid by working in the immigrant clubs and bars of Greenwich Village, becon‑dng along the way an expert in the music of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. By the early 1960s he was pooling all of his musical knowledge in his own quartet, which combined a kind of proto‑free jazz with elements of what is now termed "world music" and structural ideas rooted in Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bart6k. As a composer he was increasingly interested in microtonality, partly a consequence of his direct involvement with Greek, Turkish and Armenian music. Since 1970 he has been a professor of theory and composition at the New England Conservatory where he also teaches the only North American course on microtonal music. He has adapted his 72‑notes‑per‑octave system to his own improvising.

For the last twelve years, Maneri's gifted son Mat has been an integral part of all his father's various improvisational ensembles. Now 26, Mat Maned grew up in a world with more notes, absorbing microtonal music virtually from the cradle, and the dialogues that ensue between his custom‑built electric 6‑string violin and Joe's saxes and clarinet verge on the telepathic as they negotiate the terra incognita between the sharps and flats of the Western scale.