The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

The New York-resident Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and American violinist and viola-player Mat Maneri are touring (with three UK dates from 21 May) to launch this live duo set. Maneri's melancholy sound and imaginative phrasing have been guided by the philosophies of his microtonalist sax-playing father Joe, Ornette Coleman's free-jazz, 12-tone and baroque music – though he retains a clear affection for old-school jazz-violin swing. Ban suggests Keith Jarrett, Monk and early Abdullah Ibrahim with 20th-century classical infusions. An irregular blues opens this set, with a querulous high viola melody slowly bringing a blues motif into the open, quickening it against Ban's rootsily rocking piano vamp. Monastery, which has a more eastern European flavour, unleashes a loose and impulsive Maneri over a stamping pulse, and a solo-viola account of Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen begins at a deep hum – like some ghostly, hollow-toned wind instrument – and becomes a tour de force of edgy chordal playing, polyphonic lines going in opposite directions, low, whirring chords, and moments of unexpected tempered-pitch purity, the latter quality being sustained in the quietly impassioned Two Hymns. It's a set of sometimes brooding and rather clandestine music, but it has its own kind of melancholy beauty, and plenty of wayward exuberance, too.

(https://www.theguardian.com)