His father was a tremendous clarinet and saxophone player and his mother an amateur vocalist who spent much of her time around the church. But the music of his native land continued to inspire his work, most notably in his own compositions as documented on the Songs from Afar (Sunnyside, 2016) or the classical music of Romania’s famed composer George Enesco on Enesco Re-Imagined (Sunnyside, 2010) but also with his work alongside Maneri on Transylvanian Concert (ECM, 2013).īrooklyn born and Boston bred Mat Maneri grew up in an extremely musical household. Lucian Ban grew up along Bartók’s collecting path in Transylvania and by the end of the ‘90s he would leave Romania to pursue his career in jazz music in New York City. The composer’s own compositions would be influenced at every level by his folk studies.Ī century later, these three outstanding improvisers – Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban and John Surman – draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartók’s imagination, looking again at the carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more which the composer collected, in the period between 1909-1917. Bartók spent eight years traveling the Romanian countryside recording and transcribing these pieces, which he would spend the rest of his life collating into six catalogs containing over three thousand tunes, simply entitled Romanian Folk Music. His immediate infatuation with the music led him to a lifelong pursuit to record and catalog these beautiful regional pieces. In the early 1900s Bartók was introduced to the folk music of the Romanian people in Transylvania. Their mutual interest in the work of Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók led to their new recording, Transylvanian Folk Songs, an assortment of arrangements of folk songs collected by Bartók in Ban’s native Romania. Pianist Lucian Ban, violist Mat Maneri and woodwind master John Surman come from different backgrounds but are connected by their focus on improvised music along with their appreciation of folkloric and classical styles. *Make sure to look at the amazing never before printed original photos by Béla Bártok and the fantastic liner notes by the great engineer, Steve Lake*Īrtists’ greatest inspiration often comes from sources that once surrounded them in their native communities.
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