Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Lucian Ban + Mat Maneri: Peasant Music
Lucian Ban + Mat Maneri © 2025 Ana Stanciu
Lucian Ban first encountered Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos as a lad. It was part of the literature the Romanian pianist was expected to learn, but was of little interest to him. Improvisation became his passion as a teenager, so it was only well after arriving in New York at 20 to play jazz that he discovered the scope and depth of the 153 progressively difficult solo piano pieces. Studying classical violin since the age of five, Mat Maneri also had early exposure to the Hungarian composer’s music; however, Maneri was being exposed to so much so fast that it got lost in the crowd. At some point as a teenager – he can’t point exactly to when – he began to fully appreciate Bartók’s writing for strings and, more generally, his approach to rhythm.
Neither knew much about Bartók’s extensive research into Transylvanian folk music, which began in 1908, when the region was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the end of WWI, Bartók had lugged a wax cylinder recorder, a camera and tripod, and stacks of staff paper throughout the region. “Peasant music,” as he referred to it, remained a wellspring of inspiration that was repeatedly seeping into Bartók’s own compositions. Even if had he not composed a single work, Bartók would still be remembered as a pioneer in the field that had yet to be named ethnomusicology.
Ban and Maneri began their ongoing journey through Bartók’s Transylvania in 2017, when they were commissioned by Alin Rotariu and Jazz Upstairs to develop a program for the Retracing Bartók project, part of the runup to Timiṣoara’s year as a European Capital of Culture in 2023. They were also given access to the wealth of material housed at the Budapest Bartók Archive. “There was so much to look through that we divided stacks of music between us,” Maneri recalled of the initial process. “It really came down to what spoke to us. You know when a melody is special, that you can work with it. It’s really about feeling a personal connection to the music. Then it’s a matter of Lucian and I getting together and deciding how we present a piece, whether we put harmonies to it, how we arrange it. The melodies are so strong, they each have their purpose, they have a lot of strength. They can take anything we do with them. We can put in a lot of wild harmonies or we can play them simply – they are there either way.”
Maneri’s viola confirms the tensile strength of these melodies. Though a three-string instrument with the viola’s range was then common in Hungary and throughout the region, the melodies on Bartók’s wax cylinders are sung or played on violin. In the 1990s, Maneri’s violin playing was readily identifiable by its trademark vocal inflections – sighs, sobs, and groans – that could caress the heart or deliver a gut punch. As Maneri transitioned to a violist beginning 25 years ago – he has never played violin with Ban in their 15 years of collaboration – this ever-growing vocabulary gained even more nuance and power, his mastery of the viola’s darker tones allowing him to convey the constant struggles and occasional joys of peasant life with emotional authenticity, if not historical accuracy.
From the outset, Ban and Maneri wanted John Surman to be part of the project because of his collaborative capacity and his long relationship with English folk music. Maneri first encountered Surman at a jam session at an ECM festival in 1999 and their rapport was immediate. It turned out that Surman had delved in Bartók’s music as a student at London College of Music in the early 1960s – his final thesis examined his Concerto for Orchestra – and he still cites works like Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste and the six string quartets among his favorites. Adding a reed instrument also created a historical rhyme with Bartók’s Contrasts, the trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, commissioned by Benny Goodman in 1938 – the recording by the composer, Goodman, and Bartók’s go-to violinist, Joseph Szigeti, is essential listening.
The first collection resulting from their collaboration is Transylvanian Folk Songs: The Béla Bartók Field Recordings (Sunnyside), documenting a 2018 concert given in the Baroque Hall of the Timiṣoara Museum of Art. From the outset, they establish a character-rich polyphony. Surman’s ebulliently singing soprano, his chortling bass clarinet, and his gregarious baritone saxophone are wonderful foils for Maneri, who with every note wrings the joys and pains of peasant life like sweat from a bandanna. In addition to providing the sinew that allows music originally created for specific occasions and utilities to amble through reimagined fields and festivities, Ban, who was born in the Transylvanian farming village of Teaca, adds a voice that melds the culture and New-York-jazz-life-nurtured modernity.
“My favorite people to work with have their own identity, their own true voice,” Maneri said of Surman and Ban. “That identity doesn’t get lost, regardless of what they’re playing. It’s so strong you know who it is. Surman has ability to play any kind of melody Lucian and I throw at him – and you know it’s him. He’s a great improviser. He understands the melody, its inner workings, its rhythms, the freedom that’s in there. He’s one of the true greats.” In their notes for the forthcoming Canticum Profana (Sunnyside), Ban and Maneri take the assessment of Surman one step further, citing “his uncanny way of playing these historic melodies in his own language, while never giving up the recipe that made them so durable in the first place” – much the same can be said of Ban and Maneri, as well.
Throughout both albums, Ban, Maneri, and Surman, clear the bar Bartók set in 1921 when he wrote that the point is “not the insertion of a ‘folkloristic’ fragment into alien material but rather – and this is much more significant – on the unfolding of a new musical spirit, rooted in the elements of music springing from the soil.” Their work prompts a reconsideration of “authenticity” as an ideal, as such idealization usually implies a conformity of practice, for which there is little to no evidence in the case of Romanian peasant music. Yes: Bartók meticulously transcribed what he heard; but what a single recording or transcription does not convey is the morphology of material as it is played on various occasions by musicians from different villages and farms throughout the seasons and years. Their interpretative latitude, then, is arguably as authentic as the most literal rendering of transcribed material.
“It was like that from the first note we played in this little rehearsal room in Timiṣoara,” Ban explained. “Mat and I were a little concerned: How are we going to make this work? What are we going to do with these pieces? Mat and I had some ideas, but we didn’t know where we could go with the material and with John. But, from the first note, Mat and I looked at each other and knew it would be ok, because John knew exactly how much to play and when; and it only got better. And it changes.
“The new album is completely different from the first. And the same thing has happened with the duo, as well. What we do, individually, comes into play. A lot of what Mat has done as an improviser for the past – well, for his entire life – came into play in how to approach these pieces: the microtonalism, the sense of phrase. For me, the angularity I associate with Paul Bley came into play. There is a tune on [Transylvanian Folk Songs] called “The Return” that is a good example. I took pieces of the melody transcribed by Bartók and, in between, I put in intervals that are practically lifted from Bley. I made them work together, a piece of the melody and then a dissonant, augmented 9th comes in, and so on.
“There are other approaches, too. There’s a piece [on Transylvanian Folk Songs] called “The Mighty Sun,” which is a simple carol that had a distinctive mode. We each played it at different speeds – John would play it fast while I played slow, for example – and created some new compositional shapes. So, the material is fascinating to work with because you can do so many things with it.
“We use a lot of extended techniques that we don’t usually do in our other ensembles. I started muting the strings, which was a new technique for me that I never use in other ensembles. Mat started using the viola’s body as a drum, and mixing that with the strings. Mat will also bring in Moroccan, African, and Korean, materials – and they would work, both in the trio and the duo. It speaks to what Bartók called the connective tissue of folk music from around the world.”
Ban concurs that these connections existed long before anyone took note of them. A serious Bartók scholar, he quotes the composer from an out-of-print collection of his essays about his 1912 discovery of melodies in northern Transylvania “’of a highly ornamented, Orientally colored, and improvisation-like melody. The next year, in a village in central Algeria bordering the Sahara Desert, I heard a similar melodic style. Although the similarities struck me at the first hearing, I did not dare to see it other than a fortuitous coincidence. But later on, it became apparent that the same type of melody is well known in Ukraine, Iraq, and Persia, as well as all of Romania. In fact, it is evident that the question is not one of coincidence.’”
“There is a connection between the folk music of communities that thousands of miles apart,” Ban asserted. “There is a reason that the Korean music that Mat likes works with these songs. It’s fascinating. Bartók, in explaining why and how he collected folk music, quotes one of Romania’s great musicologists, who was in the field with him – and I quote this because this is truly what jazz is. ‘Folk melodies don’t exist, but in the moment when the peasant is singing it or playing it, and it only exists by the sheer will of the performer and the way it is played. Creation and interpretation are the same.’ That’s exactly what Paul Bley said: There is no difference between composition and improvisation. That is the definition of jazz. It doesn’t exist but in the moment that we play it.”
Ban and Maneri’s insights rhyme with Bartók’s reflection of his own immersion into folk music in that it had a liberating impact on their own work. “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work,” Bartók wrote in his autobiography, “because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys.” Something of the same can be said of Ban and Maneri, though it should be pointed out that such freedom evolves, manifesting in often unforeseen ways, depending upon the situation. Take Ban and Maneri’s ongoing duo, using their 2011 Transylvanian Concert (ECM) as the starting point. It is a decidedly Amercentric program of originals and an arrangement of “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” Ban’s jazz-nurtured sensibility is in abundant evidence; and while no one will mistake Maneri for the generic jazz fiddler, the deep blues tinge of his playing is palpable throughout.
Triangulate the duo’s Transylvanian Dance (ECM) – the duo’s recent dive into Bartók’s transcriptions – with both their earlier duo recording and their work with Surman. Throughout the album, Ban and Maneri realize the tonal freedom Bartók referenced and there is an enhanced role for decay and silence, reinforced by ECM’s trademark engineering. Their familiarity with the material – not just the notes, but a song’s function in peasant life – gives them the ability to tap the melancholy of “Lover Mine of Long Ago,” the adolescent pleading of “Make Me Lord, Slim and Tall,” and the mythos of “The Enchanted Stag.” “Soundworld” is a term too broadly bandied, often in lieu of anything perceptive; but it has credibility when applied to Transylvanian Dance. More than a century after it was consigned to paper and wax cylinders, Ban and Maneri brought the music back to life, not as anthropology, but as art, a sonic palimpsest of a bygone world partially effaced by an imagined one.
The glaring takeaway from both the duo and trio recordings is that the material has profoundly impacted the way they play. “There’s no question that this project over the past five or six years has effected the way I improvise – and Lucian.” Maneri confirmed. “Finding the strength in these source melodies gives me a new way of looking at how I improvise on any melody in any project, to find that inner core of humanity, because that’s what these folk songs are about. The messages in them are all about the human condition. The silly stuff, the profound stuff; it’s all in there. So, exploring that, keeping the humanity alive in the music, that’s how I see this developing.
“Because Lucian has put so much research into this project, we have a lot of educational material we can present – film, scores, some of the wax cylinders – and show that these melodies are timeless, but they are also relevant to today.”
“What we know now,” Ban continued, “is that the way Bartók collected this music changed the way he composed. We know this from the musicologists specializing in Bartók’s music. So, when we think about Bartók’s string quartets – like the movement in the fourth quartet that is completely pizzicato – that came out of folk music. Collecting this music changed Bartók forever. There’s also an example from the second violin sonata: it’s in the form of a sonata, but it doesn’t sound like a sonata. It sounds more like an improvisation. We know that from people who extensively studied Bartók. What Mat and I didn’t anticipate was how playing this music would change us. It's like there’s a code in these songs, and as you learn it, the music changes. We did a concert at Firehouse 12 last fall and it’s completely different from the ECM album. Why is that? These are 8 to 16 bars melodies, even shorter, and they’re simple. The reason is there’s a depth to them that allows us as improvisers to build whole worlds.”