Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri - Transylvanian Concert (2013) [Official Digital Download]

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Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri - Transylvanian Concert (2013) [Official Digital Download]

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Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri - Transylvanian Concert (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/44,1 kHz | Time - 55:45 minutes | 475 MB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Digital booklet

Recorded in the region where composer Béla Bartók collected many of the folk songs that underscored so much of his writing, the duo delivers a set largely comprised of Ban's original compositions, along with one free improv that sounds preconceived despite being drawn from the ether; one Maneri composition (the obliquely beautiful "Retina"); and one American traditional ("Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"), an a cappella viola performance demonstrating Maneri's breadth and purposeful virtuosity.
Ban's four compositions cover significant territory while speaking clearly with a voice that, like Maneri, has absorbed the language of jazz into something that transcends even its most distant borders. The appropriately titled "Not That Kind of Blues," twists and turns its conventional form, respected but stretched harmonically by Ban and Maneri to places few blues ever go. "Harlem Bliss" is darker still, Maneri's control of space and silence similarly matched by Ban, whose intrinsic classicism is, nevertheless, equally imbued by an underlying blues affinity. The more fervent "Monastery" builds gradually to the album's fieriest moments, while the closing "Two Hymns" turns to the precise opposite, with Maneri occasionally soaring but elsewhere turning to gentler landscapes, even as Ban's ambiguities create moments of unanticipated beauty.
Throughout, the pair demonstrates surprising empathy, dynamically swelling to mini-climaxes only to turn, just as quickly, to recondite terrain where little more than silence reigns, all based upon canted melodies and dark-hued harmonies. Transylvanian Concert may be the first, but is hopefully not the last time these two simpatico musicians come together in such a vulnerable but ultimately revelatory context.