CD ECM Records Joe Maneri Quartet: In Full Cry

1997

Joe Maneri - clarinet, saxofon alto si tenor, pian
Mat Maneri - vioara electrica cu 6 corzi
John Lockwood - contrabas
Randy Peterson - tobe, percutie

Maneri's ECM debut Three Men Walking was an album-of-the-year selection in England's The Guardian, France's Jazz Magazine and Germany's Jazzthetik. On In Full Cry, the 70-year-old clarinettist/saxophonist/pianist, one of American music's great originals, leads his quartet through a programme of free improvisations, jazz standards, and spirituals that hark back to his days as a street preacher in Brooklyn. The musical exchanges between Joe and his son Mat (on electric 6-string violin) - employing the grammar of Father Maneri's 72-notes-per-octave microtonal system - are like nothing else in jazz.

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"This is the stuff of legend", wrote Die Zeit of Joe Maneri's ECM debut Three Men Walking, released in 1996, and other journals were quick to echo the sentiment. Subsequently, the album - also featuring Mat Maneri and guitarist Joe Morris - was a best-of-the-year selection in publications ranging from England's The Guardian to France's Jazz Magazine and Germany's Jazzthetik. Joseph Gabriel Maneri (born 1927) was suddenly and belatedly saluted as one of jazz's great originals, a strange twist of fate for a musician whose idiosyncratic microtonal improvising and composing had been resolutely ignored by the jazz establishment for decades. Three Men was not Maneri's first recording (that distinction falling to the privately-produced Kalavinka, issued on the tiny Northeastern label in 1989), but it was the first to attract a wider press attention as journalists began to recognize that Maneri, at the very least, made good editorial copy. Who else could claim a biography that included membership of a 12-tone improvising group in 1946, studies with Alban Berg pupil Josef Schmid, extended periods playing Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Armenian and Jewish musics, a proto-free jazz and "world music" group of his own in 1961, a piano concerto commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and successive vocations as a street preacher and teacher of the only North American conservatory course in microtonal music??? Joe Maneri has walked his own path his whole life.

The trio heard on Three Men Walking came together specifically for that ECM project and has since acquired a semi-permanent identity, touring in Europe and playing regularly now on the Boston and New York jazz and alternative scenes. Maneri's Quartet, however, is the reedman's priority and has a longer history, although the precise date of its launching is somewhat foggy. With typically paradoxical flair, Joe Maneri likes to point out that he was a late arrival even in his own band, assuming leadership of it in the early 90s, some years after the unit was originally founded by his violinist son Mat; drummer Randy Peterson was also on the strength from day one. This is not the full story, however, for Persona - as Mat's band was originally called - was established on musical principles absorbed from Maneri Senior and had its genesis in a still earlier Maneri Sextet.