Though Béla Bartók is one of the most revered and influential composers of the 20th century, his profound impact on modern music would still be felt if he had never written a note.
In addition to contributing his own groundbreaking body of work, Bartók was also a pioneering ethnomusicologist who collected, researched, transcribed and recorded folk music from around the world, with a particular passion for the music of his native Hungary and the region of Transylvania. Bartók is responsible for the preservation of thousands of folk songs and dance tunes, an effort that he referred to as “my life’s goal.”
For the last several years, that music has taken on a striking new life in the hands of pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri, inveterate improvisers who both have long incorporated diverse cultural and musical traditions into their practices. On a series of albums released by ECM and Sunnyside, they have reimagined a number of pieces from Bartók’s treasure trove through their own expansive lens, as a duo and in trio with the English woodwind player John Surman. Regardless of the manifestation, the project has yielded discoveries that surprises even these veteran musicians. Ban calls the ongoing collaboration “the greatest musical encounter of my career so far.”
On Sunday, Oct. 5, Ban and Maneri will perform their interpretation of Transylvanian folk tunes at The Perch, in a concert presented by Fire Museum. The music will be accompanied by a multimedia presentation projecting Bartók’s photographs and texts along with sounds from the wax cylinders that the composer recorded in the field.
Though Maneri and Ban approach this music with an obvious reverence, by no means are their interpretations beholden to the tunes as originally documented. Instead they approach them in much the spirit that Bartók dreamed of when he wrote speculatively about “the unfolding of a new musical spirit, rooted in the elements of music springing from the soil.”
“There’s a hard truth to the way that these melodies are sung or played that is undeniable,” Maneri said recently over Zoom, lighting a cigarette in his Brooklyn apartment. “The last thing we wanted to do was a fusion, where we play a folk melody over a jazz groove. What we wanted to do was to respect these melodies at their core value and move on from there. This music is so strong that I'm able to play different ideas from Moroccan or Arab or blues culture and it still retains its identity as Transylvanian folk music.”
Ban grew up in a small Romanian village in northwest Transylvania but moved to New York in 1999 to pursue a life in jazz. The exploration of this body of work is thus something of a homecoming. “It's been quite a deep journey for me,” he explains. “This project reconciled my love for the vernacular of American jazz and improvisation with the music of where I come from. For myself and many other musicians that play this music but are not born in America, there’s always a question of how we connect ourselves to this great tradition that brought us here.”
Maneri lacks such a direct connection, but he found that the music resonated with the work of his father and collaborator, the late saxophonist Joe Maneri. A first-generation Italian-American, the elder Maneri incorporated wide-ranging musical traditions, a study of the Third Stream melding of jazz and classical, and microtonality into jazz and improvised music, including collaborations with his son.
“I grew up with folk music around me, as well as jazz and classical, so this was always part of my DNA,” Maneri says. “Bartók himself wrote that there was a certain cell structure to these folk musics that connected not just Romania or Hungary, but Morocco or West Africa, or the blues and gospel. They’re so deeply rooted in humanity that I found them endlessly fascinating and endlessly able to take abuse from us.”
The folk melodies mutate in a variety of forms. On “The Dowry Song,” originally recorded on 2020’s Transylvanian Folk Songs (ECM) and reprised twice on this year’s Cantica Profana (Sunnyside), Maneri’s viola takes on South Asian intonations while Ban’s piano takes on a percussive role. On Transylvanian Dance (ECM, 2024), they style “Romanian Folk Dance” — also the inspiration for Bartók’s “The Stick Dance” — in the vein of 1960s fire music. The same album also yields “The Enchanted Stag,” bracingly stark and modernist.
All of these albums have been recorded live. That’s as much a matter of circumstance as intention, they both insist: plans are in the works for a studio recording, as well as hoped-for collaborations with the likes of Ambrose Akinmusire, Gerald Cleaver and Bill Frisell. But the setting is also appropriate, Maneri suggests: “Folk music is played for the people around you as a community. So recording it live, in front of people, is the most appropriate way.”
The effort, begun as a passion project, has grown to play a life- and art-altering role in both men’s careers. As Ban says, “We know this music changed Bartók. Musicologists have studied and proved this. What we didn’t anticipate is that it would change us, improvisers coming from a different place in music, one hundred years later.”
Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri perform Transylvanian Dance at The Perch on Oct. 5; tickets and information at Fire Museum.
