Trinity is the first entirely solo album by Mat Maneri, played on acoustic violin and viola alone. Until then he was known on ECM mostly at the side of his father, the microtonal composer and saxophonist Joe Maneri. Here he sets out a language of his own, drawing on jazz phrasing, chamber music dynamics, the music of India and free improvisation.
Born in Brooklyn in 1969, Maneri began on violin at five and studied from the age of eleven with Robert Koff, a founder of the Juilliard String Quartet. He had appeared on four ECM records with his father, from Three Men Walking in 1995 to Tales of Rohnlief in 1998. The idea for a solo album came from Manfred Eicher after a late-night jam at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, where Maneri played a borrowed viola. It was recorded in July 1999 at Gateway Studio in Kingston, England, a room built for the London Sinfonietta, with Steve Lake producing and Steve Lowe as engineer.
Maneri's own pieces introduce a written row and then improvise on it. In the title track three tone rows meet in a fugue-like polyphony, and in November 1st he seems to split into two separate voices. The programme also includes pieces by Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris, Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. Sun Ship is rethought through Indian music, opening out of tempo in the manner of an alap over drone-like tones before breaking into fast rhythmic patterns. The album closes with Lady's Day Lament, his father's microtonal piece for Billie Holiday and Lester Young.
"Astonishing and endlessly fascinating, Trinity is Mat Maneri working at the peak of his musical powers," wrote Phillip Freeman in Jazziz. In Fiddler Magazine, Duck Baker heard stark dissonance of the kind associated with Webern or Bartók, no countable time and frequent microtones. He warned that it would be hard going for listeners unused to modern styles. Maneri himself said he did not want "to just flaunt technique, the typical 'solo' approach". In 2000, ECM notes, he had placed prominently in the critics polls of Down Beat and JazzTimes.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1719, first released in March 2001.
