Lucian Ban - The Athenaeum Concert [Half-Speed Master]

There is a spirit that runs through all the folk music of the world. The sounds may differ from region to region and people to people, but folk music contains deep truths that speak to the connective tissue of humanity. There is something strangely universal about the way peasants or, for that matter, jazz musicians approach music. For this double release, longtime collaborators pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri, alongside legendary woodwind master John Surman, further explore the folk music of Transylvania collected by Béla Bartók over a hundred years ago. Over the past five years, the trio has deepened the spirit of their music while touring, as evidenced by their new recordings, Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert (vinyl LP only). From Ban and Maneri's informative liner notes: Once we took the music on the road, a display of new musical spirit came to us at every concert. Revisiting the dances, Christmas carols, dowry songs, doinas and laments first recorded in Timisoara in 2018, new vistas opened up with each live performance, new forms arose, themes and instrumental roles were freely interchangeable, a "pulsing life of peasant music", to use Bartók's own words, carrying us forward. Intensive touring allowed the trio to truly explore their repertoire. The pieces began to expand and evolve. Surman observed: Sometimes we used small fragments of material and developed these fragments while trying to retain the spirit of the original material. Each performance allowed the trio to approach each song in a new and original way, whether by abandoning the theme entirely or subtly mixing in cues from the melodies or harmonies to guide the group into new territory. The trio had matured into a seemingly living musical organism, dancing to their own contemporary folk sounds. Finding such a dedicated collaborator in Surman was a blessing for Maneri and Ban: He has an uncanny way of playing these historic melodies in his own language, without ever abandoning the recipe that made them so enduring in the first place. His wonderful range of instruments and tones woven a wonderful sense of orchestration that allowed us to improve our own extended techniques and rhythmic alterations. Each musician brings a unique sound and approach to the music, from Maneri's singular microtonal viola tones and esoteric musical influences, to Ban's jazz leanings and archaic Romanian romanticism, to Surman's contemporary cool and Cornish brilliance. The material featured on Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert comes from the pieces the trio recorded on its initial recording, Transylvanian Folk Songs (Sunnyside, 2020), but the live reinterpretations of the pieces are so radical that a new collection of songs is born, highlighting the extraordinary power contained in these historic gems and the profound originality of an ensemble working night after night in boundless creativity. Cantica Profana compiles recordings from three different concerts, all captured from November 2022 to November 2023, with remarkable clarity from exceptional sound venues including the Center Culturel Opderchmelz in Dudelange, Luxembourg, Stanser Musiktage in Stans, Switzerland, and the Strasbourg Jazzdor Festival in France. The June 2024 concert at the fabulous Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest was so singularly rewarding in its sound quality and performance that the trio decided to release it as a standalone vinyl LP, titled The Athenaeum Concert.