Joe Maneri

This 1991 Boston Phoenix article on Joe Maneri is still one of the
best I've come across in that it does a nice job of covering Joe's
important early history, and it offers some poetic insights into what
drives Joe's art too--and few have pegged Joe's playing as perfectly
as Ed Hazell's "Old World sadness and an otherworldly joy" would.

At the time of this article Joe was in his mid 60s and right on the
cusp of breaking out. I remember being flabbergasted that it hadn't
happened yet! When I'd think of Joe I'd often think of Bird--of his
unfulfilled longing to study with Varese to add a whole other
dimension to his art. In many ways, Joe Maneri was already there: a
prototypical jazzman-modern composer, and a wildly talented one at
that... inexplicably his time would have to wait almost another four
decades.

But his time came. And when it finally did, the recordings and
accolades followed in a steady stream that continues to this day. I
doubt it couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

take care,

--Dan Stearns

A Free Man: Joe Maneri's music rides the currents of his heart

by Ed Hazell

On paper, Joe Maneri seems intimidating. He's one of those imposing
multi-hyphenated polymaths--composer
instrumentalist-educator-author--who can make you feel inadequate. In
person, the outgoing New England Conservatory professor is more like a
jovial, but weird, Burl Ives than a forbidding academic. Perhaps it's
because the 64-year-old's circuitous road to academia has taken him
from the streets of Brooklyn to the lecture halls of Austria and from
the Quartones dance band in the Catskills to microtones at NEC.

His debut CD as an improviser, Kavalinka (Cochlea/Northeastern), is an
all too-rare event in a remarkable and largely overlooked career. It's
difficult music, alternately touched with an Old World sadness and an
otherworldly joy. Entirely improvised by Maneri on clarinet and tenor,
his son Matt on violin, and percussionist Masashi Harada, it sounds
chaotic at first but is actually linked in subtle elliptical ways.
Their spontaneous ordering of possibilities is the source of the
music's power and excitement. Sometimes the players compliment one
another, one finishing a thought another has started. Sometimes they
contrast: undulating clarinet lines playing off against long, slow
violin tones and spacious percussion touches.

The music is melodic, but not in any conventional sense. The melodies
are sometimes built out of the smallest of intervals, tiny contours
that make you listen for fine gradations of pitch. But then the music
will exhaust itself, jumping in huge, wide leaps. The elder Maneri's
clarinet is especially moving, tinged with the Italian and Greek
sonorities he learned playing in dance bands. The younger Maneri is
someone to watch, full of quiet surprises and understated virtuosity.
And Harada's percussion is loaded with unexpected silences and sudden
onrushes of noise.

Maneri grew up in ethnically diverse Brooklyn, where he learned
clarinet with a shoemaker who played drums in a neighborhood Italian
dance band. By his late teens, he was working with the Quartones,
touring New England and the Catskills.

But he was never one to play anything straight for long. "I was always
jumping hurdles into a different place. I was always sort of naturally
avant-garde. I was starting to play wrong notes. My ear is good, but
not for normal people," he says.

Maneri's lifelong rebelliousness led him to some Greenwich Village
hipsters in 1947. "One night I heard Schoenberg on the phonograph and
I thought, 'Holy cow, he does all the wrong notes at once.' So we
started a 12-tone jazz group."

In 1951, through his beatnik friends, he met Joseph Schmidt, a former
student of Schoenberg's, and studied with him for more than ten years.
During this time, he worked in several ethnic bands, becoming a
virtuoso player in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Armenian music.

Word of his talent began to spread. A 1957 trio for piano, bass, and
drums that included some improvised sections caught the attention of
future BSO conductor Eric Leinsdorf, who commissioned him to write a
piano concerto but never performed it. Around the same time, his
reputation as an improviser who could also read led Gunther Schuller
to ask him to perform a composition by David Dreck dedicated to
Ornette Coleman.

By the early '60s, Maneri was playing jazz again. In 1962, he made a
pioneering, but unreleased, record for Atlantic combining Greek
melodies, jazz, and 12-tone music. In the quintet was drummer Peter
Dolger, with whom Maneri performed at one of the celebrated St.
Peter's Peace Church concerts in New York in 1963. The concert was a
personal milestone for Maneri. "At one point I saw the Holocaust; I
started feeling so bad I started crying while I was playing. What I
played changed my life, it's the style I've incorporated up until
today."

After that, Maneri dropped out. He lived out of his car, then became a
hospital orderly. Eventually, he returned to teaching in 1970, when
Robert DiDomenica asked him to teach theory and composition at the New
England Conservatory.

At NEC, his composing took a new turn when, in 1972, he began using
microtones, the intervals between the sharps and flats in a
conventional Western scale. Since then, he has founded the Boston
Microtonal Society, written a book, and invented a microtonal
keyboard. Currently he teaches the only course in microtonal
composition in the US.

One of the first of his microtonal pieces, a quartet for clarinet,
trombone, tuba, and piano, is entitled Ephphatha, meaning "open up."
The title holds special significance for Maneri. "I often tell
students, stay open to the spirit of your soul, stay open to the
spirit of your heart, and stay open to the spirit of your mind, and if
there's nothing in your mind, go put something in it." Advice Maneri
can give, since he's followed it his whole life.

Dan,

Thanks for the Maneri article. Valuable insight into another
unforgetable artist...

Cheers,
Jon