Transylvanian Concert documents a duo performance by the Romanian-born pianist Lucian Ban and the American violist Mat Maneri, recorded at the Culture Palace in Târgu Mureș on 5 June 2011. It was Ban's debut on ECM and Maneri's ninth appearance on the label. Both born in 1969, the two improvisers draw on the traditions and freedoms of jazz and on the structure of chamber music, and their 56-minute set moves between ballads, blues, hymns and open improvisation.
The concert was not planned. Ban and Maneri were touring Europe in summer 2011 with a project called Tarkovsky Redux. At the end of the tour a local promoter proposed a duo evening in the Culture Palace, a Secessionist building not far from the village in northwest Transylvania where Ban grew up. Their partnership had started in Ban's Enesco Reimagined, premiered in 2009. Ban moved to New York in 1999 and first heard Maneri there with Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard. Maneri, born in Brooklyn, is the son of the saxophonist Joe Maneri, in whose groups he first became known. Tibor Kacso recorded the concert, and Ban produced the album with Steve Lake.
Ban wrote four of the seven pieces, Not That Kind of Blues, Harlem Bliss, Monastery and Two Hymns, with Maneri's dark, liquid sound in mind. Maneri contributes the reflective Retina, and Darn is a free improvisation credited to both. His solo viola feature is the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, a piece the Joe Maneri Quartet often played. The closing Two Hymns is dedicated to the memory of Ban's grandmother, Maria Voda, and during it rain can be heard on the roof of the hall. As Ban recalls, it only rained during that tune.
Several reviewers tied the music to the region where Béla Bartók collected folk songs. In Fono Forum, Berthold Klostermann singled out Maneri's solo spiritual. Writing for All About Jazz, John Kelman heard in Ban's compositions "a voice that has absorbed the language of jazz into something that transcends even its most distant borders." In Kultur, Peter Füßl wrote that the duo blurs the lines between composition and improvisation, avant-garde jazz and chamber music, blues and twelve-tone writing.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2313, first released on 10 May 2013.
