Mat Maneri Trio

3 brilliant musicians, 3 brilliant albums. Buy 'em.

Mat Maneri (photo: Antonio Porcar)

Mat Maneri plays violin and viola. He is the son of the late saxophonist Joe Maneri, and over the course of a decades-long career has collaborated with his father, guitarist Joe Morris, pianists Cecil Taylor and Matthew Shipp, saxophonist Ivo Perelman, and many, many others. Recently, he has been working in collaboration with Romanian pianist Lucian Ban on a project that explores the folk music that in turn inspired composer Béla Bartók.

I interviewed Maneri in about 2001, for a zine I can’t even remember the name of now. He said some really interesting things, though. Here are a few quotes from the piece:

“I started violin when I was five, studied classically through, well… for a long time. By the time I was 14 or 15 I quit for half a year ’cause I was sick of the whole classical thing, it just drove me nuts. And then I realized there’s other music to play. I’d always known about them, I grew up with all this out jazz shit and other stuff. And I just started playing jazz and, basically, started playing any style of music. I just wanted to get as much under my belt as I could and become a professional. I quit high school in my sophomore year and just did it. Even after I quit high school, I took private lessons occasionally with a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet. Most of the real training came from just doing gigs… weddings, I was in a klezmer band doing bar mitzvahs, playing in funk bands and punk bands, this band and that band, and around that time I met Matt Shipp and played with him.”

“It’s funny, because in the beginning when I was doing the freer stuff, it was definitely more classical-sounding and had more of those screaming fast lines and I got bored with it, honestly. It just wasn’t for me. I wanted to get into something more to the root of the matter, express something very simple in a very twisted way. But the influences are definitely heavily from drums — swing and African music, and [I’m] also very influenced by Indian music, the way they just blow on a raga motif and just keep twisting it and turning it, but slowly developing it and kinda leading this underlying thing all the time. But it’s all kind of connected. There are so many influences I don’t even know. It’s become its own monster, in its own way.”

“The big problem with violin is that if you’re not doing something that’s really recognizable as a mainstream type of music, they think you can’t play the instrument. ’Cause it’s a hard instrument. The first thing people suspect is like, ‘Oh, he just wasn’t good enough to do fusion’ or something. I used to get that all the time when I was coming out. ‘Oh, you play out of tune because you can’t play.’ ‘No, I’m doing microtonal music, really.’”

“Honestly, the microtonal shit is hardly existent in my jazz. Yeah, I play microtonally, I bend notes, I play out of tune, in tune, but I’m not sitting there measuring note against note. But when I play classically, or when it’s a thing that’s specifically written, it’s 72 notes per octave, equal-tempered. Which means if you have a half step on a piano, white key to black key, you have five notes in between those two notes. But I’m not really a big fan of people saying ‘microtonal violinist Mat Maneri’ because it has nothing to do with my jazz at all, honestly. It’s like saying ‘microtonalist Ornette Coleman’, ’cause he was always playing weird notes, out of tune, this or that, but nobody calls him a microtonalist. I don’t believe in that. I just do what I do. …And when I write music for my trio or other groups, I don’t write microtonally. It’s just 12-tone. Normal music. Western music.”

In the mid ’90s, Maneri formed a trio with bassist Ed Schuller (son of composer and Third Stream pioneer Gunther Schuller) and drummer Randy Peterson. They made three albums for Leo Records, which are the subject of this newsletter. I think you should buy all three of them.

The first album in the trilogy is Fever Bed, which was recorded at two sessions, one in December 1994 and another in January 1996. On it, Maneri plays violin and composes seven of the eight tracks; the other is a version of Wayne Shorter’s “Iris”, originally recorded on the 1965 Miles Davis album E.S.P.

This is very much trio music, with each player vital to the whole, as you can hear on “Savigny Platz” above, which begins with a 90-second bass-and-drums intro before Maneri arrives, sliding gracefully through the music with long notes extending like a swan’s neck as it glides across a pond. These pieces often lack any kind of strict unison playing, and yet they feel as solid as a building; there’s nothing vaporous, or uncertain, about the way these three men improvise together.

The second Mat Maneri Trio album, 1999’s Fifty-One Sorrows, is subtly different from its predecessor. Here, Maneri is playing baritone violin, which gives the music a thicker, woodier sound, like trees groaning as a powerful wind courses through the forest. Again, he writes most of the music, but there are two versions of one Ornette Coleman composition, “Tone Dialing”, from the 1996 Prime Time album of the same name. (Why are all of Ornette’s albums from his 1990s deal with Verve out of print? Someone needs to fix that.)

The music sounds fantastic, particularly on headphones. Schuller’s bass is a deep, resonant boom, and Peterson’s drums rattle and swish, punctuated by infrequent tom strikes or bass kicks. Maneri’s violin slips around and between them like a snake exploring the branches of a fallen tree, moving faster than either of the other two men without ever leaving them behind.

The third and final Mat Maneri Trio disc, 2003’s For Consequence, is something different. For one thing, it’s a return; Fifty-One Sorrows had been recorded in 1997, while For Consequence was laid down in 2001. There are only five tracks, and they’re long: four of them run between eight and almost 11 minutes. As always, the majority are Maneri originals, but the album ends with a version of the standard “Laura”.

The band’s approach to the music has changed on this record. It’s audible from the opening title track. Peterson is playing much more actively, still not driving the music but pushing it this way and that. Maneri has switched instruments again, from baritone violin to viola, which has a slightly higher but richer sound, and Schuller has joined him in the upper registers. There’s a lot less underwater throb from the bass here, and a lot more energetic plucking. Maneri, too, plucks the strings at times, and plays faster, relying less on drones and long notes. This is music that has a twitchy, pinned-down energy, something reflected in its initially off-putting cover art, a photo of a hooded Maneri standing in front of blue tiles, holding his instrument in front of him like a subway busker being photographed by police.

Each of these albums stands on its own, but if I like what a group is doing I always want to hear more of it, so I’m very happy that there are three Mat Maneri Trio albums, and that they all fit together so coherently.

Visit matmanerileo.bandcamp.com to check out Fever Bed, Fifty-One Sorrows, and For Consequence.

That’s it for now. See you next week, when we’ll be talking about… Prince!