For three days in April the classic original Joe Maneri Quartet with doublebassist John Lockwood held down the bandstand at a tiny club in Brooklyn. It was a celebration of the groundbreaking unit at the lingering conclusion of a 15-year career. With two video recordists and the redoubtable Jon Rosenberg manning an 8-channel audio recording, it was an occasion to render the mythical Quartet experience for posterity. In no shape or form was it the final performances of an aging master acknowledging a reputation earned earlier and offering a touching memento for the sentimental needs of fans—not even close; this was a group playing as hot as ever and it was performance for the music, not for any peripheral considerations. At the age of 78, Joe Maneri still blows his clarinet, tenor sax, and alto sax with devastating passion and intensity in 2005, and the music that will be heard by future generations of DVD-viewers had pretty much every answer to the questions that people might ask about the musical and personal epiphanies attributed by a great many listeners to the combination of Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson, and a doublebass player. Some hints by one such listener can be found below.
A collective, co-led group initiated by Mat and Randy after the dynamic duo had concocted a volatile brew in the music laboratory of Joe's own home, the Joe Maneri Quartet launched into outer space in 1990 and hasn't come back anywhere close to Earth yet, though transmissions have become increasingly rare. The de facto semi-retirement status of the group for the past few years has something to do with the apathy towards Maneri music in its hometown of Boston in the late 90s and Mat and Randy's successive relocation to New York City following years of constant commuting. While you wouldn't know it from the way he still plays, Joe has also been slowed down a good deal by the ordinary cumulative physiological limitations of human beings and travelling and gigging have become challenges. The group has triumphed in a number of European appearances over the years, a US tour with Barre Phillips, and most recently a mini-tour with Michael Formanek in 2002, but at this point touring is no longer an option as a physical activity for Joe and even the one-off gigs with different doublebassists in New York City have dwindled to one or two a year at most in the face of logistic obstacles. Rather than bear the neglect of silence, Mat decided to have the group's sunset journey halt at a glorious shindig of an oasis, three nights of the group with its most important doublebass alumnus and an invigorating guest for each night: Matt Moran, Dave Burrell, and Herb Robertson. Not to mince words, it was billed as "A Farewell to the Joe Maneri Quartet".
The concept didn't seem to register much on Joe himself, who certainly has more gigs with Mat and Randy in his future, and was mostly ignored by a community of people who are generally accustomed to living and appreciating things in the moment anyway, who realized that every Joe Maneri Quartet gig in the past was a special event that couldn't be taken for granted. After all, this is improvised music; it's all about the moment and we had some pretty momentous moments last week, quite independent of the past and future just like all the other momentous moments of Joe Maneri gigs in the past. As awkward as it was, Mat certainly did a great thing by highlighting the reality of the group at this point in time and creating a situation where it could savored as a potent, uncompromised experience and properly documented. It was a celebration with an historical subtext, but first and foremost, it was a gig, a slice of space-time where the love and music of Joe Maneri happened. For Joe himself, every gig is a glorious and rare opportunity to enter into communion with people who love him and his music and offer him the respect and validation that is in criminally short supply in his daily life, which unfolds in a generic suburban neighborhood in Framingham, Massachusetts where his neighbors have no idea who he is and what he does. Playing in public is quite literally Joe's lifeline; it's when he really feels alive and it gives him the strength and inspiration to work through the pronounced challenges of his private daily life. As much as his playing is an ecstatic gift to the audience, he goes out of his way to passionately articulate his experience of the audience as a gift to himself. It's this existential gravity of a human being as such a transparent and emotionally riveting layer of the moment that makes a Joe Maneri gig so vital to me and others as a human being, not just as a person who happens to take a great fancy to the specific sounds Joe and his partners make.
I chatted with Joe on the phone this afternoon a bit and he mentioned he's been working assiduously on a biweekly basis for over a year with one of his advanced students, also a saxophonist, on mastering the microtonal exercises in his Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum book (a seminal nuts and bolts manual of exercises for developing familiarity with 72 subdivisions of the octave, co-authored with Scott A. Van Duyne), focusing on the technical issues of fingering to achieve the rarely heard gradations in sound possible on the instrument. Raising this topic, I hasten to emphasize that, contrary to the ubiquitous facile assumptions in hack music journalism about the Maneris, Joe has never consciously attempted to incorporate his academic studies of microtonality into his improvised music; they've always been separate worlds for him, though of course there's an inevitable interplay buried somewhere well below the surface, probably a shared wellspring of inspiration from his early days playing Mediterranean and Middle Eastern clarinet music more than anything else. Even though his teaching activities are minimal at this point in time, he does also keep in shape to an extent by playing with his students at NEC, and lately he's been trying to practice for about 45 minutes everyday to keep his embouchure in shape. Before the festival he had practiced intensively for about three weeks to ensure he'd feel good about his playing at a basic technical level. He speaks with great enthusiasm about the possibilities for various future gigs, mentioning how dearly he wishes to play in Chicago and Philadelphia again sometime, not to mention his own Boston stomping grounds, where he hasn't had much of any performance presence since the mid 90s. He's eyeballing an NEC gig for this fall. All I can say is that if there's a Joe Maneri gig in your area in the future, you owe it to yourself and Joe to attend by any means necessary, and if you're not in the area, it'll be worth every penny you spend on a plane ticket. Joe's playing is losing aspects of his past physicality, while simultaneously gaining profound new dimensions of musical thought, but aging is aging, even when it's this magnificently graceful.
When considering the Joe Maneri Quartet as a specific entity in retrospective awareness of the various duo and trio configurations that have subsequently also realized Maneri music, it's the doublebass chair that naturally demands most of our attention. In the late 80s, with Maneri music more of a tantalizing vision than a developed reality, it made a lot of sense for Joe, Mat, and Randy to avail themselves of the jazz convention of a doublebass and drumkit rhythm section, especially since Mat was still coming out of a phase where he had to struggle against aesthetic prejudices about the role of violin in jazz. Having an advanced jazz doublebassist in the group established a critical space of structural possibilities to move in and out of while exploring the ramifications of Mat's new concepts for his instrument. At a crude minimum, it gave Mat two choices for harmonic reference and relieved him of constant responsbility for pulse structure. More generally, it expanded the Braxtonian space of combinatorial possibilities for functional subgroupings. Like a lot of music that transcends its context of creation, the quartet found a balance between tradition and innovation, and the traditional structures that would've made a trojan horse out of any oversized fiddle in the hands of a jazzer were just what was needed to balance that reliable equation in the group's early days.
With the incredible fortune of a doublebassist as accomplished as John Lockwood being willing to join the venture, dozens of basement sessions and gigs followed, their public life launched in the decidedly unglamorous confines of a watering shack called The Willow. Driven by Joe's mind-boggling and age-defying energy to play, play, play—his enthusiasm understandable after waiting about 60 years for that kind of opportunity—countless hours were logged in free improvisation, often extending over two-day weekend sessions that would find Joe talking and playing at full blast in the wee hours of the morning while his younger mates struggled to stay awake. In terms of intensive creative productivity—but obviously not social dynamics—those years probably rank alongside the infamous Trout Mask Replica sessions as one of history's hottest crucibles of aesthetic revolution. A new musical language was not only created, but internalized so thoroughly that the four musicians could deal with nearly unprecedented structural complexity as easily as breathing. Melodically, harmonically, metrically, rhythmically, the group broke new ground for jazz and they did it purely on the basis of performance composition, never touching a chart. The members of the Joe Maneri Quartet simply pick up their instruments and play Joe Maneri Quartet music.
There's a point worth lingering on here. The Joe Maneri Quartet is a fairly rare example of idiomatic free improvisation. At this point in time, improvised music and jazz have diversified so much that consideration of methodology is passe, but for any one example of idiomatic free improv we could cite there's probably at least a thousand examples of non-idiomatic free improv, and idiomatic partial improv accounts for well over 99% of the music in human history. (Note that non-idiomatic partial improv is an impossibility. Idiomaticity is a characterization of content, and improvisationality is a characterization of method. While content is underdetermined by method, it's not completely undetermined by it.) In terms of idiom, the quartet's music is broadly jazz in its primary reliance on certain species of melody and pulse, and narrowly a remarkably unconventional idiom conveniently called "Maneri music". It's a somewhat subtle point that calls for reflection, but only a small fraction of free jazz is freely improvised; much more often than not, free jazz is based on pre-performance material like melodic fragments and extrapolates its macro-structure from the head/solo tradition of bop, itself a prototype of the universal theme/variations macro-structural template. When it's not merely a tedious or processually-justified diversion from non-improvisational realizations of an idiom (or poly-idiom), as is common among rock-based musicians for example, freely improvising with the specificity and coherence of an idiom is a fragile and profound achievement. (As a matter of personal taste, I overwhelmingly favor non-idiomatic moment-form free improv in my listening palette, an area of music Joe, Mat, and Randy understandably regard with disinterest and even disdain as self-identified jazz musicians; Maneri music just happens to be an idiomatic universe of its own that fulfills me as much as anything I've ever heard.) The quartet's methodological uniqueness is highlighted in contrast with the various projects Mat has led, where he's virtually always used charts, typically lengthy twelve-tone heads, opening different angles on Maneri music with partial improvisation and an expanded cast of instrumental personalities. Naturally, in these contexts where he explores his compatibility with various players, Mat doesn't have the benefit of the extensive shared performance history he can refer to in Joe Maneri Quartet music.
So with the critical participation of John Lockwood, the early 90s saw the development and profound internalization of a shared language by the Holy Trinity: the father, the son, and... the future of jazz drumming. As such, methodologically and aesthetically, a doublebassist has long been superfluous to the realization of Maneri music by the core MMP trio, and perhaps implicitly acknowledging this, the bass-less trio have done a string of concerts over the years, publicly documented on the crucial two-disc set on Leo and most recently including an astonishing set at Tonic on August 14th last year following the historic performance of a program of Joe's notated music. As a complementary factor, it has often been a challenge to find a suitable doublebassist for a given gig, and the trio has certainly had to respect the tremendous independent careers of their two steadies, John Lockwood and Ed Schuller, giants among contemporary jazz doublebassists with teeming projects to reconcile on their calendars. It's these varied considerations that heavily motivated Mat's decision in favor of official retirement for the quartet per se.
The establishment of the trio concept aside, with the primary Lockwood and Schuller phases of their development under their belt, the doublebass chair became a fruitful variable for musical experimentation and diplomatic forays into the larger avant-jazz community, with a handful of noteworthy musicians accepting the challenge to play Maneri music. This era of revolving doublebassists largely shadowed Mat's independent emergence as one of the most trafficked nodes of the avant-jazz world in NYC, especially in Matt Shipp's orbit, and elsewhere, reaching as far as curious projects with the likes of Guillermo Gregorio. In this role he established a reputation as one of the most flexible and brilliant improvisors in the world, reaping the rewards of a youth spent tackling almost every genre he could possibly stick his fiddle in, and at this point he's arguably more well-known for playing non- Maneri music than for doing his thing with Joe and/or Randy. (It hasn't hurt that he's an easygoing, accomodating, and suave gentleman aside from his musical gifts.) With the universal respect he earned among his peers, a cadre of elite players have trusted him enough to wield their axe in Randy's rhythmic twilight zone. (I'll never forget the time when Mark Dresser built up a surging locomotive that almost any other drumkitter in the world would've taken as a launchpad for the biggest groove in history, but Randy responded to with a single loud whack on his snare that created a motional vacuum so strong I was gasping for breath.)
The same qualities that made doublebass so vital in the early days of the quartet made it eminently acceptable as a wild card. It's is an instrument that doesn't get in the way, an instrument that can fall back on the traditions of groove and rhythm in relation to a drumkit, or relate to its higher-pitched relative in the violin family as in a string quartet, or any number of the abstract roles established for doublebass in the past 40 years of jazz and post-jazz. It's the comfort and familiarity of this instrumental combination—drumkit, doublebass, reeds—that is crucial to the success of this quartet music, functioning as a grounding and accessible pre-contextualization for the extremes of abstraction and unconventional structure the group always reaches for. If this music was played on different instruments, it would probably be consigned to the ghetto of esoteric experimental music and lose its vague halo of "jazz" acceptability. (In other words, the records would sell 300 copies instead of 3000.)
So bass is a safe instrument for the MMP trio; try another reed or brass horn, or a guitar, or a piano, and you're in a high-stakes gamble that Maneri music might lose. I saw it happen first-hand at the gig with Ray Anderson last year on the 8th of April. Anderson unleashed one of the most riveting and heart-stopping extended trombone solos I've heard that night and it goes without saying that he's a master—BassDrumBone being one of the greatest groups in jazz history in my view—but he might as well have been sitting in with a reggae band because he was miles away from the Maneri idiom. While there was depth and riches in his playing, it was coming from some entirely different blues/jazz universe than Maneri music and the group wound up resorting to "normal" jazz passages interspersed with attenuated and non-attenuated versions of their usual thing, not that there's anything bad about playing "normal" jazz—as long as it's not too often! Joe, Mat, and Randy can switch into old-fashioned jazz mode in a heartbeat, and it can be a lot of fun, though disorienting to me as someone who hangs his hat inside their idiom.
The rotating-doublebassist concept had an element of racial symbolism. For Joe it was a rare and ideal opportunity for him to express the bond he feels with black jazz musicians as the historical community in which jazz originated and developed for several decades. Needless to say, the relationship between racial identity and artistic identity for black jazz musicians has been a source of unresolved (and probably unresolvable) controversy for a long time and thoughtful arguments have been advanced both for and against the relevance of this conceptual category. The best policy is to engage an individual's intentions on a case-by-case basis and forego knee-jerk generalizations about concepts and terminology. Joe is from a generation that spent most of their lives with socio-cultural separation based on America's notorious skin color dyad (two categories instead of an overflowing handful or a continuum of variation) as such a tangible fact of everyday life that the ideological nuances of recent decades have a pie-in-the-sky irrelevance to their worldview. As such, it's probably hard for him imagine that anyone would respond to his attitude of historical awareness and solidarity with anything other than enthusiasm and recognition of the goodness of his heart. In reality, there've been a number of occasions where Joe's had to butt heads with folks on this topic because of misunderstandings and miscommunications.
The primary bone of contention has generally been Joe's perception of an underrepresentation of dark-skinned people in his musical sphere. Perceiving this, he specifically sought black doublebassists as guest performers in the quartet. With Mat usually serving as a liaison between Joe and the jazz world, Joe's urgings and Mat's musical acumen converged in the cases of Cecil McBee, William Parker, and the dearly dearly missed Wilbur Morris, the latter two doing a gig apiece and McBee doing two gigs, the first documented on the hat ART classic Dahabenzapple, and the follow-up transpiring many years later in an incendiary gig at Tonic. It should be understood that Joe's window on the jazz world is about as tiny as you can get for someone of his performance and recording stature; he's simply never been on the scene. He's earned a living as a professor at the New England Conservatory, where he immersed himself in post-Schoenberg composition and microtonal theory and composition, and as an outgrowth of the conservatory's social climate he created his own buzzing musical universe in his living room—quite literally—in Framingham, where his reed prowess began leaking into the public consciousness. Intertwined with this, he raised three children, and in the past 15 years he's had a public career doing gigs with Mat. That pretty much accounts for the past 35 years of Joe Maneri's life. Needless to say, his quantitative assessments of racial balance in the avant-jazz scene have been based on extremely limited data. Further, like a lot of musicians, but quite unlike others, Joe has always been entirely consumed by his own creative drives to play and compose, passing the decades minimally aware of the happenings of the jazz world; he didn't go to gigs or listen to records. It's only retrospectively that he's discovered and celebrated his aesthetic kinship with folks like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. As a youth in Brooklyn, his exposure to music was dominated by the local culture of white big bands and it wasn't until years later in his twenties that he learned about the royalty of royalty, Duke Ellington and his revolutionary work, an epiphanic delay he continues to lament and cite in his conceptualization of racial inequity.
Aside from the straightforward point looming large in my mind that the black musicians of today are simply different individuals than the black musicians of yesteryear, there is the subtle matter of Joe's musicological relationship to jazz in the first place. Sure, his group unmistakably plays some variety or another of jazz as a broad space of melodic and rhythmic orientation, but so do dozens of other groups around the world who locate their musicality on historical continua far removed from the first few decades of jazz as a predominantly African-American art form. The history of 20th century music is a tree that quickly dwarfed the human perceptual window in a mad fit of furcation, a mutation created by the information revolution, and we live in an era of radical aesthetic pluralism crowding the cavernous interstices of ethnic and racial classifications. I once selected some fairly arbitrary examples of Maneri music as a primer for a friend who was developing an unusually discerning interest in avant-garde improvised music, but who had minimal exposure to it at the time beyond some free jazz and had never heard of the Maneris; besides the gratifying response of immediate and effusive enthusiasm for the music, her conceptual framework was fortuitous as she excitedly volunteered a revealing description of the music as "free classical". Having spent decades immersed in the decidedly unjazzy concerns of twelve-tone and microtonal composition, it's understandable that Joe has always considered his quartet music to be pure jazz reflecting his decades of playing his horns in all manner of decidedly unacademic contexts, but given the frame of reference of most listeners, his improvised music recalls the abstraction of Pierre Boulez just as much as the song of Lester Young or Ornette Coleman. It's noteworthy how often avid free jazz fans have strongly negative responses to Joe's improvised music; for a lot of folks accustomed to pretty out stuff, it's an impenetrable mystery, although a lot of them eventually change their minds after a few rounds of self-questioning and encouragement from the many Maneri proselytizers of the world.
Thinking about my own musicological affiliations, I'm more likely to listen to Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, or Horatiu Radulescu than John Coltrane or Albert Ayler—not to suggest there's any measurable difference in my enjoyment between these things, all among my most cherished music—and I'm vastly more likely to listen to Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Jack Wright, or John Butcher than any of that academic notated music or jazz. Socially, living in a certain part of the world and having personal relationships with certain kinds of people, there's a very tangible and immediate sense in which I'm part of jazz's diaspora and lead a jazz-centric lifestyle, Mingus boxsets enthroned atop my stereo and that kind of thing, something that cannot be said about my relationship to, say, Korean opera, but at a purely musical level, when you strip away the socio-cultural associations, neither can lay a greater claim to possession of my musical soul. So my general attitude towards anyone's sense of connection to jazz is "who cares?", as in "you can do whatever you want and slip in and out of any of the dozens of abstract cultural tribes that comprise the contemporary global village as simultaneous, overlapping layers", pretty much textbook postmodernism, no qualifications or revisions required. That accounts for my instinctual feeling that Joe's expression of historical and racial awareness is a quaint and extraneous gesture reflecting his social context as a jazz musician, which is just my take and in no way diminishes the value of this authentic and beautiful glimpse into the heart of Joe Maneri. Take it for what it's worth, something and nothing more.
The identity of the quartet's doublebassist has attained a special personal significance for me over the years as my concert attendance has wound up being a nearly exhaustive survey. In fact, it's likely that I've seen more versions of the quartet than anyone else, except Mat's brother, Abraham, who seems to have missed at most one of the versions over the years. In any case, as far as I know, I've seen the quartet with every doublebassist they've deployed, with the sole regrettable exception of William Parker, a gig I understand to have taken place in the late 90s sometime, possibly before my JM4 baptism at the Tonic gig with Cecil McBee (a night that began with an 8pm set by Satoko Fujii's NYC orchestra if I recall correctly). So here's a list of every doublebassist that's lent a hand to JM4 music, in chronological order: John Lockwood, Ed Schuller, Cecil McBee, William Parker, Barre Phillips, Wilbur Morris, Michael Formanek, John Hebert. It's a matter suffering from fading memories whether there was a Mark Dresser gig, a point of fact-checking I haven't been able to cover, but Dresser's titanic instrumentalism definitely factored into a December, 2001 Maneri Ensemble performance that amounted to a blend between JM4 + guests and one of Mat's chart-driven projects. My favorite JM4 doublebassist has always been the one I'd heard most recently, no exceptions. On public record, Lockwood, Schuller, and McBee are represented, though it's downright criminal ECM or someone else hasn't released some of the ample recordings of the quartet from their US and Europe performances with Phillips, who Joe bonded with as if they were brothers separated at birth, not that I'm complaining about the two trio treasures ECM has released with Barre and the Maneris, but the beast only fully awakens with Randy on the drumkit; there's quite a bit of vital Maneri music sadly gathering dust in private archives, including the quartet's album with Joe McPhee as guest, to say nothing of Joe's historical performances as a reedist and performances of his notated music.
The matter of Barre Phillips' relationship to Maneri music has a distinctly sentimental dimension for me. The very first Joe Maneri performance I attended was the highly anomalous Mat-less trio of Joe, Randy, and Barre—Mat was on tour as a sideman but was otherwise slated for the gig. It was at the Old Office in the Knitting Factory back in the days when killer jazz gigs were par for the course in the cozy basement space. I'm not sure about the date, probably in 1998 or 1999, but it was definitely a year or two before the US quartet tour with Barre in June, 2000. At the time, the incentive for me to make a trip into the city had as much to do with Barre Phillips' presence as Joe's, and I think there were a lot of folks around that time period who received an introduction to Maneri music via their familiarity with Barre's legendary career—the first time I saw Barre play was in the Chicago FMP festival in November, 1995, which included a curious set joining Shelley Hirsch with a doublebass quartet of Barre Phillips, Kent Kessler, Harrison Bankhead, and Peter Kowald! Nevertheless, I was already in the tentative early stages of gravitating towards Joe's thing with lingering memories of my initial Maneri music encounter listening to the 1996 release Let the Horse Go. At the time of its release I stumbled across it thumbing through the new release drawer at the college radio station where I was doing a weekly slot in the jazz program. It piqued my curiosity enough to get played on-air a few times, but to be honest it was little more than an oddity that I can't claim to have understood in the busy throes of that formative period of musical self-education. In any case, that set with Joe, Randy, and Barre had me on the edge of my seat completely mesmerized by the alternately lurching and graceful sound shapes fleeting through the air. Already at that time I remember speaking to Randy with deep-seated convictions about his revolutionary importance in history of jazz drumkitting; I can't recall whether I'd seen him prior to that, perhaps with the Mat Maneri Trio? I also recall an older gentleman who I don't recall ever seeing again—evidently an improv connoisseur long familiar with Barre's work but who'd never heard of Joe and Randy before that gig—approaching Randy afterwards to passionately report on a specific moment of transcendence he'd experienced because of one of Randy's cymbal hits; he also spoke with astonishment at lacking any prior awareness of this elderly bearded man who could play with Barre Phillips in such an esoteric and tightly shared language. Joe's playing captured what I really loved about free jazz and introduced all manner of things I'd never imagined before. Combined with his rapturous speeches about love and bubbling warmth as a person, I had plenty of incentive to make more Maneri pilgrimages in the following years. In fact, I've attended almost every Joe Maneri gig in the mid-Atlantic US region (from NYC to D.C.) since that first experience; it's become a focal point of my life. Cats like Joe don't come around everyday, and they don't come around forever.
It's been quite a ride following the Holy Trinity's assimilations of different doublebassists, but I'm sure glad this 3-day festival honored the importance of John Lockwood as the man at JM4 ground zero. Unless I'm forgetting something, it was only the second time I'd caught him with the group, following the Ray Anderson gig last year. Lockwood holds down an academic position at NEC like Joe, albeit in the jazz program, unlike Joe's ironic composition/theory appointment, and he's had an extraordinarily productive career still very much in its prime, playing with a who's who of modern jazz, including brilliant work with The Fringe, Gregg Bendian, and so on, but earning something like co-composition credits for Joe Maneri Quartet music is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, which he also shares to a significant extent with the similarly accomplished Ed Schuller. It was clearly second-nature for him to take equal responsiblity for the ebb and flow of the quartet sets over those three days. In the liner notes of Let the Horse Go, Lockwood reported on this eloquently:
Once, in Switzerland, I stood by a fast-flowing river, wondering what would happen if I jumped in. It took me two days to decide, and then I jumped. It was wonderful. The current took over and carried me a great distance. It's the same feeling when I play with the Joe Maneri Quartet. There's so much force of movement, but it's an evolving, structured development. It takes concentration to just listen, be like the audience, but when I do this, something takes over. And it works, it just flows.
On the first night of the festival, Wednesday, April 20th, these four old friends jumped into the surging rapids of Maneri music pretty quickly. I remember a moment early on when John and Randy suddenly exploded together and I felt my body unceremoniously shifting right into ecstatic mode without a warm-up to speak of. I find Maneri music extremely physical, a kind of dance music for religious seizures. Every note Joe plays means so much that it feels like my body is gliding upwards with the very pitches of his arcing long tones. I don't know how they can make such busy and energetic music feel so spacious and stately; it's a paradox I'll enjoy contemplating for decades to come as I return again and again to recordings of the trio and quartet. The music is highly episodic—unlike a lot of free jazz they never let structure-building rest on the crutches of momentum—but they're clearly obsessed with making transitions that weave the episodes into larger forms. A lot of my favorite moments come when Mat takes a four-way maelstrom and freezes it into a plateau of suspended time with an abrasive, uninflected long tone. I'm pretty sure there've been times when my pulse and heartbeat have simply stopped. There was a moment in that first set on Wednesday where something even better happened: Mat hit his volume pedal to the floor and issued one of these time-defying notes, quickly followed by a very soft, yet still edgy, long static tone, which didn't decay before John eliminated the possibility of decay with a terrifying arco passage that made the two stringed wooden chambers feel like a single instrument obviating the limitations of nature to issue back-to-back tsunamis. I just know that John is the only bass player in the world who would've made that miracle happen, who would've been so in tune with Mat's structural intentions to grab time in his hand and lob it into the audience to arc and resume.
The festival was organized with two sets per evening, the first a pure quartet set and the second with a guest. Sadly I missed Wednesday's set with Matt Moran, but all reports the following day were glowing. I made the awkward and difficult decision to attend to a competing priority—the Berne/Rainey/Friedlander set at The Stone—a totally transcendental, monumental, and rare event. (And needless to say I also missed the Melt-Banana set happening at the same hour at the yucky Knitting Factory, an extremely easy and painless decision even though that is my very favorite electric chamber ensemble and I have to marvel at the absurdly slim odds of these three things happening in the same city at the same time—my favorite unrelated music in the world all at once!—although I can't raise this topic and not mention the unforgettable night I had a few years ago when I saw a full two-set Joe Maneri Quartet concert in Washington D.C. and then zipped over to another D.C. neighborhood to catch a Melt-Banana recital without missing a note. There are some crazy people in the world these days—I offer myself as proof.) In any case, my rather firmly held opinion that Matt Moran is the most advanced vibraphonist in the history of jazz is based primarily on my past experiences seeing him perform with Mat Maneri's experimental ensembles—including some that included Joe—and it's worth noting that among the three guests featured during the festival, he's the only one with a background in Maneri music. In fact, his background is unusually deep, having been a student at NEC and experiencing Joe's legendary and idiosyncratic mentorship at a critical stage in his personal development. Besides the fact that Matt Moran is one of the pivotal members of the current NYC creative music scene, and especially the Barbès mini-scene, his collaboration with the quartet was deeply appropriate at a purely musical level and I anxiously await the recorded evidence of Wednesday evening, not to mention a long overdue public document of his participation in Mat's extraordinary projects as a leader. (Mat and Matt appear together on the free improv masterpiece Vanishing Point released on hatOLOGY under Ellery Eskelin's name, but it's not Maneri music.) There are precious few musicians of any instrumental persuasion who can legitimately play Maneri music, and it's downright miraculous that he's achieved this musicality on such an awkward, problematic, and microtonally-challenged instrument as vibraphone.
Thursday's guest for the second set was Dave Burrell, whose slight connection to Maneri music is a recent relationship with Mat based on a successful trio performance with cellist Okkyung Lee this past February and some plans to test out a working unit with Randy and Drew Gress in the future--they've got a slot in this year's Vision fest. Like any great improvisor, Burrell understood the value of sitting out some sections and when the quartet was roaring at full power he was more or less drowned out, though it bears mentioning that the piano at Barbès is a run-of-the-mill upright. As such, there were only four brief sections where Burrell had a role in the music, including two unaccompanied solos--the first was the kind of riveting and hyper-creative acrobatics that his reputation is based on, so inspired that Joe let out a few of his characteristic cheers. Joe's own responses as a listener in the middle of his own performance is one of the special quirks that draws listeners into his zone of joy and love. It brings to mind a longer and similarly jaw-dropping piano solo that had Joe spontaneously expressing his rapture—Craig Taborn's solo during Joe's 75th birthday celebration at Tonic a few years ago. Joe slipped into achingly sweet bop tenor sax playing to accomodate Burrell for an especially beautiful duo passage, and Randy and John locked up with Burrell for a hot freebop trio section.
Friday's guest was Herb Robertson, but due to a scheduling mistake the evening's second set was cancelled to accomodate another event, so the quartet did a few pieces with Herb and ended the festival with one quartet piece. Herb was totally inside the music, an eminently flexible master improvisor who listened and understood Maneri music; I just wish this combination had happened years earlier! Actually, even though it was his first time playing with Joe, Herb was fresh off a French tour with Mat playing in a quartet led by the wonderful doublebassist and composer Claude Tchamitchian and rounded out by Christophe Marquet on drumkit. So there was a tight musical bond between Herb and Mat going into the set, but I think the more relevant point is that Herb probably would've been as naturally conversant in Maneri music if he'd never heard or met Joe and Mat previously. The way I see it, Joe's music comes first and foremost from a long lifetime of not only playing the unique quavers of his own nervous system, but also playing other people's music enough to transcend his personality. The same can be said for Herb. In other words, just like Joe spent decades breathing Greek music and other traditional musics, Herb put in his own time in the 60s and 70s playing blues and jazz night after night in bars and that sort of thing before making a transition to doing his own thing full-time. I reckon there's some balance in their musicality between understanding how music works for themselves and how it works for others, with an extraordinary grasp of the nooks and crannies of living folk musics, a repository of wisdom and hints about the semi-universal underpinnings of the human aesthetic response to sound.
Among the more salient highlights of the pieces with Herb was Joe's characeristic foray into sound poetry being unexpectedly mated with one of Herb's own vocal flights. Just like Herb often has a half-dozen different mutes on hand to make the most of the hole at the end of his horn, he's no stranger to making the most of his naked oral cavity. After a rousing duet passage, Joe concluded his poem-song, but Herb's more energetic vocalizing had built up a head of steam that needed a few minutes to run its course, much to my delight. I'm sure it's been a rare occasion when Joe's performed with someone who shares his confidence in exposing his naked humanity through his voice in a way untempered by the aesthetic conventions of an external instrument or pitch-based singing. It strips away the layers of artifice separating sound and a human being's private state at a moment in time, one of the special rewards that can sometimes materialize in freely improvised music.
Unfortunately, as with many of his performances, a few giggles circulated in the audience when Joe started speaking and singing in his self-invented sound language. Joe's a ham and I doubt he's bothered by this, but from my point of view this aspect of his art should be taken just as seriously as Jaap Blonk, Phil Minton and other people who deal in a similar medium as their primary activity, certainly pursuing a more extensive elaboration of the voice's formal parameters, but no more in possession of the intrinsic structural logic of an individual's authentic expression than Joe. Laughs are cheap; laughs can come from anything at anytime, but sublime sound poetry like Joe's is a rarity and it deserves some respect. I've experienced other occasions where people have chuckled in response to unconventional improvisation that I considered quite serious and focused, and at the very least people should understand that they are impinging on the integrity of the performance environment for others who wish to experience something closer to the performer's experience, which is certainly not humor in Joe's case or the other cases I'm thinking of. If people want laughs, they should stay home and watch the comedy channel or whatever it is that people do to amuse themselves. To the extent that Joe and Mat's music positions itself in jazz culture in contrast to the anti- or trans- idiomatic avant-garde improv culture, I often sense less acceptance or understanding of different artistic modalities beyond the melody-and-pulse + expression-as-sport paradigm that dominates jazz culture. In any case, I find tremendous sophistication and value in Joe's sound and text poetry, but I'll reserve a proper treatment of this topic for another occasion.
On the matter of the cancellation of set #6 of the festival on Friday night, I won't suppress my indignance. When I consider the artistic significance of the quartet's music and the historical significance of the festival as a celebration of this 78-year old man's belated career as a free jazz icon, and then think about all the washed-up has-beens that have played lucrative gigs at places like the Village Vanguard, Iridium, etc to the knee-jerk adulatory frenzy of non-discriminating jazz fans who act more like tourists striving for an "I was there" t-shirt than listeners trying to be blood cells in the pulse of the music, I can't help but feel betrayed by my culture. Joe Maneri has reached as high a level of artistic achievement as anyone in the history of jazz instrumentalism—Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, William Parker, anyone you care to name—he's pushed the limits of his instrument for decades, and together with Mat Maneri and Randy Peterson he's introduced a radically new and complete musical concept and created an extensive body of work developing it over the past 15 years. Further, the value of his art has been proven by the experiences of a sizeable group of human beings with considerable awareness of the world's aesthetic menu. Along with Anthony Braxton, Joe McPhee, Imrat Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Derek Bailey, Barre Philips, Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker, Kazue Sawai, Györgi Ligeti, and others, he is one of the world's greatest living, functioning musical treasures. I think that Barbès could've let the originally planned second Joe Maneri Quartet set of Friday evening supercede the pedestrian monthly local bar-culture event attended by only about five people that happened instead. I frankly found the situation to be depressing and ridiculous and it's among the chief reasons I wish the festival was held at a better venue. Now, I like Barbès; I've been there a handful of times and had great experiences, but I don't really care if I offend anyone in that scene with my attitude. I mean, geez, I live 2.5 hours away in rural Pennsylvania and I don't make various personal sacrifices to visit New York City on occasion to drink alcohol at dumpy bars or be chummy with the semi-musical locals; I do it to recognize, support, and be enriched by what I passionately believe to be the most important cultural activity in my lifetime. Whatever. There's a place in life for a little ranting, you know. Plus, I know for a fact that I'm not alone in having some of these feelings about the festival or even the general situation of Joe Maneri's public career. It's an honest angle on the topic that deserves viewing.
There are some who felt it was appropriate for the concerts to be held in Brooklyn, and in fact in the same neighborhood where Mat lives and Joe owns or manages a house where his mother once resided. There was a dimension of local connectedness to the proceedings. In the notes to the first Joe Maneri Quartet album, Get Ready to Receive Yourself, there's a quote from Ran Blake that stirs up my emotions as I reflect on last week's events: "Along with Jimmy Giuffre and perhaps tomorrow's Don Byron, Joe Maneri is one of the 20th century's greatest clarinetists. His music is full bodied—it wreaks of Flatbush Avenue, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the fire of the Middle East." Flatbush Avenue—the very same road I drove those three days on my way to and from the gigs in Park Slope, a road that conjures up the common and quite defensible claim that Brooklyn is where New York City really starts once you get past the ossified accretions of elitism, commerce, and tourist culture that largely constitute Manhattan. Come to think of it, I recall a conversation with Joe once where he expressed a lot of pride in Brooklyn as his home and his feeling that New York City is Brooklyn in some sense much deeper than functional nomenclature. "When I say 'New York', I mean Brooklyn" was his part of his clarification. From the bowels of Brooklyn to the suburbs of Boston and back to Brooklyn—there's layers of symbolism in Joe's abstract round trip, some layers best left private.
But no amount of waxing symbolic or sentimental erases the inadequacies of this tiny bar as a venue for this festival. With the refreshing ideological stance of The Stone still very much in my thoughts, I wish it had been held there or some other larger space in Manhattan like Tonic, the locus of most of Joe's performances in recent years, where the audience would've been larger and more musically focused—there were people talking and carrying on in the un-sound-insulated adjoining bar section of Barbès, as if they were oblivious to the profundity within earshot. There were people who couldn't even squeeze into the standing section in the back of the performance room, the "sardine section" as a friend aptly described it, people who had strong feelings about Joe and his music.
Travesties aside, it was an entirely warm and fulfilling experience for me personally, with a human element going beyond the music itself. I'd make the case that there was a person in that room who was at least as important to Maneri music as the musicians themselves, Joe's wife and Mat's mother, Sonja Holzwarth Maneri. Sonja has as much passion and understanding for this strange kind of jazz as anyone else, and besides being a singer and pianist with her own legacy in the semi-public living room culture of the Maneri household, she's an outright brilliant and accomplished painter, so it's not surprising I've heard her speak many times about the intense imagery she experiences listening to it being performed. While it's only a hint of her extensive body of work, Sonja's paintings have served as album artwork for Kalavinka (the first ever release of Joe and Mat's music) and the classic quartet albums on Leo, Get Ready to Receive Yourself and Let the Horse Go. I can't help but notice the motherly love and pride flowing from Sonja's body language during those moments when Mat's playing goes so deep that I almost have to pinch myself in disbelief, when it's as if a massive neon sign is flashing overhead: "WE ARE NOW BEHOLDING THE GREATEST VIOLIN IMPROVISOR IN HISTORY". (Of course he plays viola more often these days, but I don't care to dwell on this trivial distinction.) The man is the Eric Dolphy of the violin. He's also the John Coltrane of the violin, and the Ornette Coleman of the violin. And there's nobody else who even comes close. It's a pretty big deal and it's often pretty obvious to anyone in the audience. So there must be some pretty strong emotions for the woman who changed his diapers and saw his first days of bow-scraping segue into his first days of unprecedented mastery, sitting in a public audience and giving witness to the fruits of her son's artistic vocation. Some musicians have parents that deeply support their music, but in the unique case of Maneri music, Mat's parents are actually inseparable from the music itself.
Mat's brother Abraham lives in the neighborhood and not only attended the festival in its entirety, but has the distinction of attending more JM4 gigs than anyone else, probably by a long shot. Not a musician himself, he's truly inside the music just like his mother. His talents as a writer can be seen in the poetic and insightful liner notes of The Trio Concerts and he's a regular figure in the poetry scene loosely associated with the NYC free jazz scene. On Thursday his savvy as a performing poet came to the fore when he improvised a speech before the second set, talking about the early days of the quartet from the perspective of someone who lived in the same house when it was born and attended the legendary formative gigs, and recounting an early gig where Joe screamed at the audience "Love happens" before launching into the music. Nearly overcome with emotion himself, Abraham used that phrase as a refrain in his speech, conveying the almost traumatic intensity of Joe's declamations in those days. It gave a flavor of what it must've been like to experience Joe in those early days of his public performing career in the early 90s, before his mythical fervor gave way to a relatively calmer and gentler stage presence. Joe Maneri gigs are not a casual experience and they're not just about music. I've seen Joe give some pretty intense speeches about love and audience communion in the past, which have had a pretty serious impact on me personally, though it's hardly something I'd have any idea how to talk about; during the festival he was less talkative and extra-planetary than usual—no majors zingers to report—but his wit and charm were still in ample evidence. Joe really means it when he talks about love and what it means for him to have an audience exchanging love with him. Joe might be a ham and he might say some pretty far out things, but his words are as genuine as you can get; his speeches about love are as serious as his life, which is pretty serious.
Another great moment of spoken word came on Thursday at the start of the first set, when Joe got Steve Dalachinsky to improvise an introductory poem at the last minute. Steve is one of the classic "characters" of the NYC jazz scene, a member of the Vision festival's organizational committee, and something of a poet-at-large for the scene, and I've got to give him his due as a poet, because he created a perfect mood for the music, invoking solemn and celebratory imagery with an impeccable delivery even though he was extemporizing from scratch, gazing around the room for inspiration; it's very rare that he performs without prepared verse, so it was something of a test of his poetic mettle.
Steve is also a pretty serious listener, as is his partner Yuko Otomo, and our extended three-way discussion of the music after Thursday's concert during the ride back to Manhattan was among the most edifying of the many chats we've enjoyed over the years. They've been friends and fans of Joe since the late 90s or so when they met at a poetry-related event—in fact, two of Joe's invented-language poems appear in the fabulous first volume of Intervals: The Poems and Words of Musicians that Steve co-edited. Yuko, herself an accomplished poet and painter, has been a steady observer of the downtown NYC scene for at least two decades as an improv afficionado, so she understands as well as anyone that there's a lot of filler in between the real stuff. It's from this perspective that she gushed about how real Joe's music was, its authenticity and lack of formula or artifice, and how rare this is. Yuko and Steve noted the contrast between the JM4 performances and a gig they'd recently attended of an all-star supergroup of jazz veterans who fell back on insensitive stock patterns without engaging the musical moment. Steve went ever further in his praise, noting that his opinion comes from the perspective of someone who's been going to 3-5 gigs a week in NYC for something like 30 years; he said Joe's the only musician he's heard in his lifetime besides Cecil who truly sounds like noone else, who can't be traced to any tradition or stylistic continuum. Steve did acknowledge that another exception in his experience might be Albert Ayler, but he'd only heard him once when he was (of course) much younger. Thoughts like these from folks like Yuko and Steve are not to be taken lightly; they're a beautiful testament to Joe's status as one of the true giants in free jazz history and a Braxtonian restructuralist of the highest order. Basking in the transcendence and profundity of what we'd just experienced, Steve grasped an analogue in the world of painting he and Yuko have been so immersed in for decades, suggesting Joe's music is closest to Mark Rothko in its expansive and dramatic attempt to reach beyond the limitations of his medium and the attendant pathos (of the reaching). In some sense, Steve's thoughts resonated with my own persistent conceptualization of Maneri music as an escape from time, and time is certainly the basic medium of music. While it may reflect little more than a person's understandable habit to find connections between objects with a persistent presence in their daily affairs, I've frequently felt a shared effect of atemporality between Maneri music and Morton Feldman's mid and late period, an experience of clusters of details that cancel each other's directionality and let the music simply float, as if time was no longer a line, but a surface.
Another rich episode of life-affirmation came after Thursday's concert when Marni Rice, an old student of Joe's who'd experienced Joe and Sonja's mentorship and friendship, not only had a warm reunion with the man of the hour, but pulled out her accordion and serenaded Joe with an absolutely beautiful French song, demonstrating that she'd found her own path in music after her soul-searching days at the conservatory.
Perhaps I'll see a rare one-off Joe Maneri Quartet gig once a year or so in the future; perhaps not. But between all the memories of this and earlier quartet events and the cache of public and private recordings I'll continually revisit, this music will be an intimate presence for the remainder of my lifetime. Being well accustomed to the infrequency of Joe Maneri performances, the recordings have already assumed a prominent role in my listening life for years. It's a dreary month that doesn't host at least one session of transcendental immersion in a Joe Maneri Quartet performance preserved for posterity as an epic post-jazz composition. As they are all from the 1993-96 period during which the group saw its greatest activity and Joe reached his mythical peaks of instrumental prowess, especially on clarinet, I could not possibly pick a favorite among the six public releases of JM4 music—they are all equally essential—but when it comes to recommending a record to anyone who wants to investigate Joe Maneri's music, I continue to adamantly stand by Light Trigger as the first priority. Yes, that's the duo record of Mat and Randy with nary a note from papa Joe in any literal sense, but my logic is simple: Joe Maneri's music has reached its pinnacle with the Joe Maneri Trio and Quartet, and the duo of Mat and Randy is the very engine that drives these formations. Some newcomers to Joe's music may be tempted to immerse themselves in the revelatory details of Joe's tone and melodies, overcome by its independent power as an individual instrumental line with no precedent or peer in the history of jazz, perhaps biased by the conventional figure-ground relationships cultivated in the history of reed-based small groups, regarding the rhythmic interactions of the group as a secondary—or possibly even inhibitory—background component. But this would be to reduce Joe's playing to its shadow, because the group's rhythmic interactions are neither primary nor secondary in relation to his instrumental line; they are actually part of it. When we speak of "phrasing" for any great improvisor, it is impossible to isolate melody from dynamic contours or meter, or vice versa; it's the ups and downs of Mat and Randy's attacks and the push and pull of their forward motion that give Joe's notes their gripping feeling of invitation, climax, or billowing expansion. Likewise, in the recordings of Maneri music without Randy, like the duos on Blessed and the trios with Barre Phillips on Tales of Rohnlief and Angles of Repose, Randy is still present in the music; in an incredibly tangible way the phrasing of Joe and Mat in those performances simply would not exist without the concepts of temporal abstraction co-developed by Mat and Randy in the mid and late 80s and further developed in the early years of the quartet. Akin to the best things in art and life, the seed of these concepts appears to be some mysterious and irreducible idiosyncracy of Joe's instrumentalism probably dating back at least to the 1950s—and evident in the unreleased sax/drum duo recording from the mid 60s, the holy grail of unheard free jazz—but it's Mat and Randy that grew a tree from it, and Joe found new life as one of its strongest branches. In other words, an understanding of Joe Maneri's music requires an understanding of the Mat/Randy duo music on Light Trigger. Because of the sheer intensity with which it distills so much of the MMP aesthetic, I have to cite it as my favorite recording of Maneri music.
The equal importance of Randy Peterson to Maneri music is a topic rarely addressed in the sparse literature on the subject, much of which is typical record review fare batting around standard cliches and extraneous references to Joe's interest in microtonality. Randy's own insights in the liner notes to Let the Horse Go and Fever Bed are indicative of the systematic and extensive concepts of rhythmic organization that he's consciously developed. Mat's remarks in his Bagatellen interview with Alan Jones shed much light on Randy's significance:
Randy is one of the people who dates back to my teenage years. I met him when I was around eighteen and he became one of the most influential people on my style. He really came in and I think both of our lives have affected each other's lives so much that no change has been so strong for me as meeting him and vice-versa, I think. When we met he was a straight ahead bebop player, probably one of the best that I have ever heard. He just floored me. And then I was doing this out stuff that he wasn't really into, but he was curious about it. "You mean you can actually do this. You can actually create music beyond the changes and this and that, but effectively." I think that he was frustrated with a lot of the free jazz and the sloppiness, the lack of detail. And chaos. [...] He really changed a lot of what I was doing. And I think that I changed a lot of what he was doing. He doesn’t play straight-ahead much anymore unless he has to. I really learned a lot from him with time playing.
In my view, there are two main directions that jazz drumkitting can proceed. One has reached its pinnacle so far in Tom Rainey's work; this direction has also been brilliantly explored by dozens of other drumkitters and largely deals with permutations of momentum. The other was invented by Randy in the process of co-creating Maneri music and has not been explored much at all by anyone else that I'm aware of, with the valuable exception of John McLellan, and largely deals with multiple layers of implied pulse. Randy's certainly the most elusive and inscrutable third of the Holy Trinity, and it's evidence of how radical his concepts are that some experienced free jazz listeners have had negative reactions to Randy's playing. I've talked to people who've said it sounds like he's not listening, and it's easy to imagine that unitiated listeners might feel he's sometimes bashing away and violating the tenderness of Joe and Mat's aching melody and harmony. On other hand, I know plenty of Maneri music fans who can hear how Joe, Mat, and Randy simply breathe together; they're all aware of an unstated rhythmic framework they've internalized from so many years of playing together, so the rhythms are often felt not heard, to use a phrase I don't know the origins of, but Mat himself has used in the past in some form or another. Randy is always referring to some underlying layer of pulse or meter, and I think a lot of people just need more explicit information about these layers than Maneri music provides.
But this is not some kind of theoretical game; the proof is in the body. The groove in the trio and quartet music is so intense that I've found myself spontaneously convulsing in my chair during Maneri concerts—including some extended passages during this festival, although I was standing in the back during Wednesday's first set and happily feeling more free to groove; standing is so much better sometimes. This is a really rare experience and I absolutely hate seeing live music with any kind of conventional emphasis on groove; I find it painfully boring. There are situations where the understood purpose of a gathering is to dance, not to politely and attentively listen to music as in a typical concert. In those cases I'm thrilled by conventional grooves and can find endless pleasure in dancing. What we're talking about here is some kind of abstract groove that's constantly mutating, but is just as strong as James Brown. It's probably far less than 10% of the time that I have a concrete bodily response during a typical concert, and the number of occasions where I've just been sitting in a chair in a virtually motionless crowd and I've had such an intense bodily reaction to the music that I've entered a kind of maximally transcendental state of involuntary and spasmodic joint rotation is such a small number that I could easily list them. Here's the list: A handful of Tim Berne concerts with Tom Rainey, the 6/7/2004 performance by PAK (Ron Anderson/Jesse Krakow/Keith Abrams), the 2003 Vision Festival performance by Hamid Drake, William Parker, Fred Anderson, and Kidd Jordan, and most of the Joe Maneri Quartet performances I've seen, including some of Randy's unaccompanied solos. These are the peaks of my bodily experience while listening to live music. So when it comes to Randy's playing, I don't need too much theory (though I wish there were more)—the body doesn't lie.
Anyone who talked to me in the wake of any of the JM4 gigs I've attended in the past would've caught an earful of religious enthusiasm, but somehow I've always been reluctant to attempt a textual memento. I suppose this could be my last opportunity for freshly post-experiential reportage about the Holy Trinity + Bass ritual, but writing these remarks I feel I'm really beating around the bush. My emotions run so strong about these musicians, this music, and this group in particular that I'm a bit nervous about really trying to delve into the topic. So I apologize that these remarks have been so cursory and detached; perhaps someday I'll find words to convey the importance of Joe Maneri in my life. In the meantime I'll just keep trying to listen and love with the inspiration I get from his cues and example.
~Michael Anton Parker
Visit the Joe Maneri Website.
To learn more about Maneri music, the primary text so far is still Ian Nagoski's definitive 1997 interview with Joe and Mat that appears in volume 1, number 4 of Halana, a gorgeous publication well worth acquiring even without this important interview.
Posted by al on May 11, 2005 02:32 PM.................................................. © 2003 - 2005 bagatellen ..................................................