‘Ash’ by Mat Maneri Quartet Review: Jazz That Treasures the In-Between

The pages of MAD magazine have long included “marginals” by artist Sergio Aragonés —tiny line drawings that creep from the edges of pages. They appear as if coming from nowhere yet communicate a great deal, wordlessly.

Violist Mat Maneri’s music is a bit like those drawings. These purely instrumental songs—mostly original compositions and adaptations, often of Eastern European folk music or Western classical repertoire—seem to drift in from someplace just out of view, their gestural strokes and shifting colors more so than any particular notes conveying meaning.

Such is the case with the first and title track of “Ash” (Sunnyside), the new release from Mr. Maneri’s quartet. It begins with broad, slightly warped tones bowed by Mr. Maneri. The feeling is spacious, the development much like stasis just beginning to yield to motion. Pianist Lucian Ban plays spare figures and isolated chords. The sound of John Hébert’s bass arrives like enveloping thuds. Drummer Randy Peterson’s snare-drum rattles and light cymbal strikes color the air more than move any beat. Yet halfway in there’s a gentle propulsion and collective impression: Mr. Maneri’s tones grow purer, more direct. His quartet’s interplay sounds less like a new song forming than the remnants of an old one being recovered.

If this music emanates from anywhere, it is from mists of the past. Mr. Maneri’s compositions here “delve into deep-rooted memories,” he told me, “that maybe have been distorted over time.” Most of these memories, as far as music is concerned, connect to his father, Joe Maneri —an innovative saxophonist, clarinetist and composer who was an influential teacher at the New England Conservatory in Boston for 37 years, and who died in 2009. Regular soirées at the Maneri household when Mat was a boy would involve Joe’s colleagues, such as the composer and historian Gunther Schuller, as well as Joe’s many students.

Mat’s deepest memories are buried within particular musical phrases or renditions. One track here, “Brahms,” is based on the Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Viola Sonata No. 1, Op. 120, as Mr. Maneri remembers it played by violist James Bergin, who studied with his father. The brief yet dramatic phrases that form the basis of Mr. Maneri’s “Earth” were drawn from a 1964 “Peace Concert” by his father (in duet with drummer Peter Dolger ), which Mr. Maneri listened to obsessively on a reel-to-reel tape (it was commercially released in 2008).

Mr. Maneri is one of modern music’s most distinctive string players, and one of its freest-ranging talents. He has played with past masters including pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, and is an essential element in several important groups (pianist Matthew Shipp’s String Trio, including Mr. Maneri and bassist William Parker, is a singular and wondrous ensemble).

If his playing knows no genre and often defies standard notation, it’s because he was raised in the spaces between those styles and notes. Joe Maneri’s music and scholarship placed modern jazz, composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School, and Eastern European folk styles on equal footing; his abiding fascination was with microtonalism, music that uses intervals smaller than the semitone, the smallest by Western music standards (and which occur naturally in most folk music and blues). The quartet Mat played in and assembled in the 1990s for his father to lead focused on, he told me, “pitches within pitches, rhythms within rhythms, dynamics within dynamics.”

That same sense of granular expression, of continuums rather than fixed points, animates Mr. Maneri’s current quartet, which made its debut on his 2019 release, “Dust.” These musicians now mine their own communal memories. Mr. Maneri began playing with Mr. Peterson in the 1980s and with Mr. Hébert a decade later. His close bond with Mr. Ban, who was born and raised in central Romania, began in 2010, and includes their 2013 duet recording, “Transylvanian Concert.”

On the new release Mr. Ban’s composition “Dust to Dust” extends his “Mojave,” from Mr. Maneri’s previous recording, into a 10-minute-plus piece; Mr. Maneri plays its bittersweet melody with brilliant clarity and complex shades of feeling. For his own composition “Cold World Lullaby,” Mr. Maneri draws upon three references: Sol Kaplan’s score to “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (a favorite film of his childhood); a Sicilian lullaby his grandfather taught him; and “Lume, Lume,” a traditional Romanian song he learned from Mr. Ban. On another original composition, “Glimmer,” Mr. Maneri’s viola often sounds like a horn in a jazz band—a quality that he said owes as much to his studies of Baroque music with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff as to his listening to Miles Davis recordings. It also results from the way he combines his instrument’s natural qualities with deft use of amplification and a volume pedal.

In Mr. Maneri’s hands, the viola is both acoustic and electric; each tone is neither this note nor that; his quartet, which sometimes sounds larger than it is, mostly moves as one; and his music speaks simultaneously of a distant past and a present moment.

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal and is editorial director for Chamber Music America.