Joe Maneri

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Joe Maneri in 2004 at the 40 Watt Club in Athens (Georgia) .

Joe Maneri (born: Joseph Gabriel Esther Maneri ; born February 10, 1927 in Williamsburg , Brooklyn , New York City , New York ; † August 24, 2009 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American musician (alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet and piano) and composer as well as music teacher. Joe Maneri, the father of violinist Mat Maneri , did not become known to a wider audience as a jazz and improvisation musician until the 1990s .

Life

Maneri grew up in an Italian-American family in the Brooklyn district of Williamsburg and learned to play the clarinet from a neighbor . At the age of 15 he had to leave high school and became a professional musician. At the beginning of his career as a teenager he played the clarinet and saxophone in various dance bands and the Catskill circuit . He mostly performed with traditional ethnic groups (such as Greek, Turkish, Syrian musicians) and with klezmer formations at weddings and other gatherings. From 1946 he was a member of Ted Harris' jazz band, in which Angelo Musolino was also active as a guitarist at the time and who occasionally improvised atonal. Until 1958 he studied for a decade with the conductor Joseph Schmid , who was a student and confidante of Alban Berg . In 1963 he was commissioned by the conductor Erich Leinsdorf to write a piano concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra , the rehearsals of which had begun, but which were not premiered due to the high rehearsal effort. The piano concerto Metanoia was performed by Rebecca la Brecque and the American Composers Orchestra in 1985 at Lincoln Center .

Maneri was strongly influenced by the music of Arnold Schönberg at this time and organized a jazz ensemble to perform some pieces of his twelve-tone music. In 1963 he recorded a demo tape for Atlantic Records with this quartet due to Gunther Schuller 's interest in Maneri's music . However, these recordings were not released until 1998 when comic book writer Harvey Pekar ( American Splendor ) obtained a copy of these recordings and presented them to John Zorn , who released them on the Avant Records label under the title Paniots Nine . The pieces represent a synthesis of Maneri's experiences with the traditional music of the American immigrants, elements of Arabic music and his understanding of twelve-tone music; He combined this with free improvisation music , analogous to the then current innovations of avant-garde and free jazz musicians such as Sun Ra or Ornette Coleman . A duo performance with drummer Peter Dolger in 1965 was later released by Stu Vandermark (the father of Ken Vandermark ) ( Peace Concert ).

In 1965 he appeared as a soloist with a composition by David Reck , which was dedicated to Ornette Coleman; The concert was conducted by Gunther Schuller in New York's Carnegie Hall . From 1970 he taught at the New England Conservatory of Music , initially harmony, composition / counterpoint, saxophone and improvisation. In the following years, based on the work of Ezra Sims, he turned more and more to microtonal music and ultimately divided the octave into 72 notes; since 1979 he has taught the only microtonal composition course in the United States at the New England Conservatory ; his students included u. a. Jamie Saft , Cuong Vu , Julia Werntz , Ed Schuller , Marty Ehrlich , John Medeski , Oscar Noriega , Dave Ballou , Matt Darriau , Jorrit Dijkstra , the composer Randall Woolf and Matthew Shipp . Together with instrument makers, he also developed a keyboard spanning five octaves on which 588 different microtones can be generated.

In 1981 he participated in the Klezmer music revival in New England . In 1985 he and Scott van Duyne wrote the textbook Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum , in which he presented his findings on microtonality. He also presented his approach internationally, for example at the Mozarteum and Harvard University . In 1988 he founded the Boston Microtonal Society , of which he is president. In addition, he continued to compose. One of his compositions for violin was recorded by the violinist Biliana Voutchkova on her CD Faces .
In the next few years, although he improvised microtonally with a sextet in private, he rarely performed and only made occasional recordings. In 1988 he performed with Jack Reilly . The interest in his music awoke when his son Mat appeared more and more in public and impressed with his music-making attitude. Since his youth, Mat Maneri had been involved in his father's experimental microtonal sextet, which rehearsed in their house. In 1989 Joe Maneri released his first album with his son and percussionist Masahi Harada.

"His unique way of improvisation, a mixture of Albert Ayler and Alban Berg, led colleagues such as Paul Bley and Cecil Taylor to push, Joe Maneri comeback." Joe Maneri finally achieved noticeable public attention when he at the 1992 Montreal Jazz Festival on on the side of Paul Bley and was then able to record a number of albums for HatHUT , Leo and from 1995 for the Munich Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM), most of which were created in a trio with Mat Maneri and guitarist Joe Morris ( Three Men Walking 1995). In his trio and quartet formations of the 1990s and 2000s, John Lockwood , Randy Peterson and Barre Phillips also played , with whom he toured France for three weeks in 2002; In the same year, the album Goin to Church with Roy Campbell , Matthew Shipp , Barre Phillips and Randy Peterson was created with an expanded line-up for the avant-garde label Aum Fidelity . In addition to his own projects, Joe Maneri played in 1996 on the album Acceptance, recorded under Mat Maneri's direction, and in the quartet of Pandelis Karayorgis ( Lift & Poise ). In August 2000 he played in the trio of one of his students, the pianist Steven Lanthner with Joe Morris ( Voices Lowered ).

Harvey Pekar, a longtime fan of Maneri, arranged for his music to be used in the film version of his comic book American Splendor . In 2003, 24 of Joe Maneri's poems appeared in the anthology Asemia . In 2009 Maneri received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory .

Charlie Wilmoth described Maneri's game as "a slippery, room-filling alien blues." According to the authors Richard Cook & Brian Morton, after his rediscovery, he is celebrated just as much as his colleague George Russell .

Discography (selection)

  • Paniots Nine (Avant, 1963) Demos, published by John Zorn
  • Kalavinka (1989)
  • Dahabenzapple (hatART, 1993)
  • Get Ready to Receive Yourself ( Leo Records , 1993, ed. 1995)
  • Let the Horse Go (Leo, 1995)
  • Three Men Walking (ECM, 1995)
  • In Full Cry (ECM, 1997)
  • Coming Down the Mountain (HatArt, 1997)
  • Blessed (ECM, 1997)
  • Tenderly (1999)
  • Tales of Rohnlief (ECM, 1999)
  • The Trio Concerts (Leo, 1998)
  • Out Right Now (hatART, 2001)
  • Going to Church ( Aum Fidelity , 2002)
  • Angles of Repose (2004)
  • Peace Concert with Peter Dolger (Atavistic, 2008)
  • Pinerskol with Masashi Harada (Leo, 2009)

Publications

  • Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum (1985).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in The Guardian
  2. ^ Felix Klopotek , in W. Kampmann, Reclams Jazzlexikon , p. 328
  3. ^ Paul Bley made contact with Manfred Eicher; see. Cook / Morton, 6th ed., P. 950
  4. ↑ a slippery, space-filled alien blues . Cf. Ch.Wilmoth: In Full Cry (Allmusic)
personal data
SURNAME Maneri, Joe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maneri, Joseph Gabriel Esther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musician (alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet and piano) and composer as well as music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 2009
Place of death Boston