Mat Maneri ASH Quartet at Bop Shop Records

0:00 – Cold World Lullaby 7:45 – Untitled 13:58 – Brahms 21:00 – Glimmer 28.11 – Dust to Dust Mat Maneri (viola), Lucian Ban (piano), Brandon Lopez (bass), Randy Peterson (drums) Recorded Live at Bop Shop Records, Rochester NY on October 13, 2023. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Dan Gross. Concert hosted & produced by Tom Kohn and Jann Nyffeler. Mr. Maneri envisages his music as one of activity in stasis, or motion within stillness and continues from the lineage of master improvisers Paul Bley and Paul Motian (with whom Mr. Maneri has played in the past) with a sound that is distinctly his own and developed over decades of discovery and practice. Following the acclaimed 2019 Dust album, Sunnyside Records releases ASH, the second installment of his trilogy for quartet, a recording that showcases Mat Maneri stirring playing in a program of open-ended compositions that present his unique marriage of jazz and microtonal music alongside an ensemble of modern master improvisers. If a certain elusiveness permeated the quartet first album, with Ash comes the permanence of memories burned into the mind, of songs triggered by scenes past from decades before, of what poet Denver Butson, who penned poems for each track on the album, calls “all that's left is this what was once something before it was ash”. From the first piece, its title track, the album explores extending the boundaries of what you can create in, of how various sources like a Brahms viola sonata, a motive from an improvisation by his father Joe Maneri, or a Sicilian lullaby can be filtered through a microtonal group approach to push the boundaries of what a jazz quartet is today. ASH album on Bandcamp: https://sunnysiderecords.bandcamp.com... THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ”Jazz That Treasures the In-Between - Maneri is one of modern music’s most distinctive string players, and one of its freest-ranging talents – the jazz’s viola virtuoso” ROLLING STONE “A shining example of patient instrumental exchange that can sound like chamber music melting slowly off the page” ALL ABOUT JAZZ ”Mat Maneri has changed the way the jazz world listens to the Violin & Viola” NOWHERE STREET, Peter Margasak “Maneri’s playing is spectacular, with greater heat emanating from his attack than usual, but he’s also at his most lyrical, a quality definitely enhanced by Ban’s playing” JAZZWISE “Maneri writes and plays with a towering strength of character and eye of the needle precision . . . a fascinating slide between static and dynamic sensation” DOWNBEAT “This is a collective music, suspenseful without being tentative, and it’s as much about listening as playing” FREE JAZZ COLLECTIVE “New classical, but in truth a jazz combo that has dropped the formalism, kept the nocturne, and added a torch singer carried by the viola veering in and around pitchless angst. Maneri’s viola is mourning incarnate”