Highly relatable for a jazz listenership when you make the leap.
Bluesy, intense and mercurial probably because Béla Bartók is so relevant to Charlie Parker such sounds linger and fascinate. And yet Transylvanian Dance is a world away from the big city, bebop and the African-American experience. Nevertheless this collection of folk (doina) pieces once collected by the great Hungarian composer and performed by pianist Lucian Ban - very much a modernist in a Craig Taborn-like vein - and violist Mat Maneri fits right in.
Maneri proves a dazzling presence on an evocative album recorded live in the western Romanian city of Timișoara at the CJT in 2022.
Dip further into the duo's earlier work including their striking collaboration with English saxophone icon John Surman on Transylvanian Folk Songs - The Bela Bartók Field Recordings (Sunnyside) also recorded live in Timișoara four years prior.
The US/Romanian duo are no strangers to Manfred Eicher's ECM and have been playing together for some 15 years. Their rapport developed into a unique sound borders on the supernatural and erases all sense of genre constraint. The doina style contains a lot of decorative grace notes and has an improvised element that involves stretching notes and using tempi that can falter or quicken depending on taste and the mood of the often lament laden piece. There's a grace, free flow, movement and mysticism about the spell cast. One even wonders as W. B. Yeats reflected, how can we know the dancer from the dance?
Out at the end of August. 'Poor Is My Heart' is streaming. Mat Maneri, top left, with Lucian Ban. Photo: Mircea Albutiu/ECM
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