Interviews/Profiles -

Mat Maneri’s Quartet Seeks “. . . joy through sorrow, elation through fatigue”

Published 9 October, 2023 By John Chacona

Mat Maneri 4 — *photocredit: Mircea Albutiu*

The improvising violist Mat Maneri recalled a conversation with his ECM Records producer, Steve Lake about the nature of music. “

“He thought it was all religious and I said, ‘No, it can’t be that.’ But there is something sacred about that stage and your relationship with the audience that once you’re onstage,” Maneri told me by phone last week.

There’s something sacred about the music that Maneri and his quartet will offer at BOP STOP Wednesday in a concert presented by Cleveland’s essential New Ghosts organization. Drawn from the violist’s latest recording Ash (Sunnyside Records, 2023), the music is a memory project that casts an oneiric spell that is simultaneously elusive and completely absorbing.

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Culmination: A Massive New Book Honors The Centenary of Sam Rivers

Published 21 September, 2023 By John Chacona

Monday, September 25, 2023, marks the centennial of Sam Rivers’ birth. Rivers was a composer, improvisor, theoretician, scenemaker mentor and instrumentalist of Promethean stature. It’s hard to think of anyone quite like him. So it’s appropriate that his centennial is commemorated by “The Sam Rivers Sessionography,” a new book by Rick Lopez that rivals Rivers in its panoptical audacity.

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A Venerable Free Improv Showcase Finds Its Way Back

Published 28 March, 2023 By John Chacona

*Togishi (from left): Mike Sopko, Joe Tomino, Dan Wenninger*

After the cultural extinction event of 2020, some lifeforms re-emerged sooner than others. You would expect the ones with the most funding to be among the first to return, though perhaps not at their previous strength. And you might imagine that the more DIY scenes, the ones for which precarity is an ongoing fact, would also survive.

The 1Way at the Go Factory series of free improvisation shows curated by saxophonist Dan Wenninger, is one of the survivors, though it’s more like a cicada than a hardy cockroach. It hasn’t been dormant for seven years; there were a few scattered comebacks last fall. When the series resumes March 28 at the Go Factory loft, with Togishi and the Folger/Bruce/Martinez Trio, it will mark what Wenninger hopes will be a second beginning, a 1Way 2.0.