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6 November 2022

On Sunday, 6 November 2022, starting at 8 p.m., a new concert within the Chamber Jazz series, 2022-2023 season, will take place at the Multicultural Centre of Transilvania University of Brașov. The well-known trio consisting of the American pianist of Romanian origin Lucian Ban, the British saxophonist John Surman and the American violinist Mat Maneri will play tracks from the album Transylvanian Folk Songs.

Recorded in Timișoara, in 2018, in the Baroque Hall of the Art Museum, as part of the Retracing Bartók project, the album is included in the tops of the best 2020 discographic materials, tops made by critics specialized in jazz music. Moreover, the album has received acclaim through articles and chronicles in numerous American magazines and journals dedicated to jazz, such as Jazz Times, Jazziz, Jazz Views, Jazz Trail, but also in Brazil, Sweden, Iran, Latvia, Hungary.

The NPR critic Kevin Whitehead writes of “the mystery and clarity with which the trio infuses traditional Transylvanian songs, of how the piano rings like church bells.” JAZZ TIMES magazine describes the album as “an act of tribute, as well as of transformation", while JAZZIZ eulogizes “the imposing dance of the baritone saxophone with the rhythm of the piano and the rigorous sound of the viola”.

Lucian Ban

“One of the best pianists who moved to New York in the last decade” (Bruce Lee Gallanter), Lucian Ban is a Romanian-born pianist and composer, known for the way he pours Transylvanian folk music and 20^th-century European classical music into the moulds of jazz and improvisation.

His album Enesco Re-Imagined, released in 2010, won numerous awards, and it was described by Jazz Times as a visionary album, placing Lucian Ban and John Hébert among the most important performers of the 21st century.

Author of 20 albums under his own name for prestigious labels around the world, Lucian Ban is the only Romanian jazz musician who recorded for the famous record label ECM (Transylvanian Concert), and whose recordings won the Best Album of the Year awarded by Downbeat Magazine (Elevation, Songs from Afar), Jazz Journalists Association (Enesco Re-Imagined, Mystery), and US National Public Radio (Transylvanian Folk Songs, The Bela Bartók Field Recordings).”

John Surman

Composer and multi-instrumentalist, John Surman is a central figure in European jazz. In the 60s, he stood out as a baritone saxophonist, then he started playing soprano saxophone and bass clarinet. In the 70s, he experimented with synthesizers, composing two reference albums: Westering Home and Morning Glory.

His music transcends the familiar boundaries of jazz, as Surman is equally interested in the tradition of the genre he approaches and in the qualities of choral music and traditional English music. His originality comes, as The Times points out, from his ability to combine the methods and texture of modern jazz with a thoroughly English sensibility.

Mat Maneri

During his career spanning over 25 years, the American violist Mat Maneri changed “the way the jazz world listens to the violin and viola” (All About Jazz). Today he has a reputation as one of the most original artists of his generation. Maneri’s music has a distinctive sound, in which the meeting between jazz and microtonal music gives rise to an expressiveness that The Wire has qualified as “perpetually fascinating”.

In 1990, Mat founded the legendary Joe Maneri Quartet with his father, the drummer Randy Peterson, and with the bass players Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. The quartet’s recordings for ECM Records, Hatology, and Leo Records have been recognized by critics and fellow musicians among the most significant discography releases in twentieth-century improvised music.

Maneri’s 1999 solo debut at ECM Records marked his acknowledgment as a musician with a unique voice. 

Retracing Bartók is conceived as a multidisciplinary cultural archaeology project developed over several years, starting in 2018, and it is part of the Timisoara 2023 European Capital of Culture programme. The project is co-produced by Jazz Updates and Timișoara 2023, and it is curated by New York pianist of Romanian origin Lucian Ban and the American violist Mat Maneri, together with Jazz Updates.

The entrance is free.

Reservations at cultural@unitbv.ro