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"HiGH ▀ iNTELLiGeNCE tRoLLS"
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a r t i s t : Joe Maneri
t i t l e : In Full Cry
d a t e : 1997
l a b e l : Ecm
g e n r e : Jazz
r l s. d a t e : Oct-2004
t r a c k s : 12
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 103,1 MB
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Joe Maneri clarinet, alto and tenor saxophones, piano
Mat Maneri six-string electric violin
John Lockwood double-bass
Randy Peterson drums, percussion
Saxophonist and clarinetist Joe Maneri has spent most of his
multidecade career as a teacher and music theorist, a
biographical fact you would never surmise after listening to
his music. So complete is Maneri's vision of his instruments
that he sounds as if he's made dozens of CDs instead of his
precious few. His best CD yet, In Full Cry, lives plentifully
up to its title. Maneri plays an efficiently microtonal sax and
clarinet, often bursting into upper-register yawps. He finds
notes between notes and shades between nuances, never hurrying
and ever fueled by his son Mat's wide-angle electric violin.
Rounding out Maneri's quartet are drummer Randy Peterson and
bassist John Lockwood, who lay planks of rhythmic solidity and
provide fluid meshwork beneath the music's itinerant leaps. All
seasoned avant-gardists, these four make a yearning prettiness
out of their music, expressing a categorical sense of the
intersection between microtonalism and post-free jazz. --Andrew
Bartlett
"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.
From childhood onward violinist Mat Maneri was entranced by his
father's sound-world and his conviction of its importance has
been unswerving. "Basically, I always wanted to play like my
father. I was always fascinated by his compositions and by his
improvising, by his phrasing on the saxophone." The microtonal
grammar of Joe's music - Maneri's system has 72 notes per
octave - was absorbed easily and naturally by his son.
At 14, Mat joined the Joe Maneri Sextet, a band that played the
Boston bars and clubs for about two years. "The improvised
style which we have now was really begun there. In that band we
used to write out quarter-tone rows and rehearsed using Joe's
Microtonal Studies, and I carried some of those experiments
further with Persona which started out more as a mixture of
jazz and modern classical music. But by the time the quartet
evolved, by the time we persuaded my father to pick up his
horns and come out and play again, the nature of the music had
grown more organic. To me, it's a jazz band, not a 'microtonal
ensemble', even if the organisation of the music is sometimes
'chamber-like'".
In Full Cry is jazz, above all, because of the sweet-sour
beauty of Maneri's saxophone which, for all the "strange"
phrasing, has a skewed emotional affinity to the languages of
Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker and the other
titans of the tradition. As for the clarinet, Maneri spells out
a few influences in one of the song titles here: "Shaw was a
Goodman, Peewee" and his technique and liquid sound on this
instrument make him, in the words of Jazz Times, "among the top
rank of improvisors in the world today."
Jazz standards also form a (small) part of the Maneris'
repertoire. The successful reconstruction of "What's New" on
Three Men Walking prompted them to cast their net for a
partner-piece and "Tenderly" on the present disc has a
comparable poignancy. For In Full Cry, Joe also plays a solo
piano rendition of Ellington's "Prelude To A Kiss", a piece he
has played in innumerable variations throughout his long
career. The quartet also brings into play two spirituals,
"Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" and "Sometimes I Feel Like
A Motherless Child". These are songs that Joe and his wife
(singer/ pianist/painter) Sonja used to perform often in the
early 1960s when both were active as street preachers in
Brooklyn, also holding recitals and bible classes in hospices,
psychiatric wards and homes for the elderly. In the present
versions, "Nobody Knows" is a vehicle for Joe's clarinet and
"Motherless Child" a showcase primarily for Mat's electric
six-string violin.
The remainder of the album is turned over to the collective
improvising that is the band's forte and which, again, is
removed from the "norm" of free playing. On the one hand, the
musicians honour a chamber music ideal in which all voices are
crucial. On the other, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson, and John
Lockwood must reckon at every moment with Joe Maneri's extreme
unpredictability and follow his lead...
Bassist John Lockwood, originally from South Africa, has toured
with Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Gary Burton, and The
Fringe in the United States and Europe. He has also played with
Pharoah Sanders, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Joanne Brackeen,
Billy Higgins, Kevin Eubanks, Pat Metheny and many other jazz
musicians. He sees his role in the Maneri Quartet as an
anchoring one, "finding a few good notes that can supply a
centre."
Rhythm plays an important role in the Maneris' music, although
pulses are more often implied than stressed. Drummer Randy
Peterson seldom plays "time" but thinks in terms of phrase
lengths almost in the way that, say, a tabla player might in
another music and has a similarly vital interactive function
and a sensitivity to tone uncommon amongst percussionists.
Peterson has come a long way from roots as a blues drummer (he
can be heard in this capacity backing singer Marvin Denton
through a series of recordings). After moving to Boston in the
mid-80s he devoted his energies to developing an
individualistic approach to modern jazz drumming. In addition
to his work with Persona, with the Mat Maneri Trio and the
Maneri Quartet, Peterson has played with guitarists Bern Nix
and Joe Morris, and with bassists Ed Schuller and Cecil McBee.
http://www.ecmrecords.com/Background/Background_1617.php
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01-Coarser And Finer [03:02]
02-Tenderly [09:34]
03-Outside The Dance Hall [04:48]
04-A Kind Of Birth [05:05]
05-The Seed And All [04:15]
06-Pulling The Boat In [02:16]
07-Nobody Knows [08:23]
08-In Full Cry [07:53]
09-Shaw Was A Good Man, Peewee [05:07]
10-Lift [02:20]
11-Motherless Child [03:24]
12-Prelude To A Kiss [06:21]
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62:28 min
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