Old World sadness and an otherworldly joy

I recently came across this (old) Boston Phoenix article on Joe
Maneri, and I've decided to go ahead and post it here for anyone who
might be interested... It's very interesting to note that at the time
of this article (November 1, 1991), a mere nine years ago, Joe (though
already 64 years young) had only a single local and independently
produced record, _KAVALINKA_, to his name (and this article is in fact
a biographically generous review of that record)... Since that time,
Joe's recording career (the 1962, "pioneering, but unreleased, record
for Atlantic" mentioned in the article was eventually released by John
Zorn's Avant label as _PINOTS NINE_) and international reputation have
blossomed, and today they stand on a much more even keel with his
immense talent.

Dan

*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=+

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 quite 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 lead 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.