SPACE ACADEMY: Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri

Wednesday, May 10, 18:00-20:00, entrance € 25 / students € 20

Entrance incl. concert: € 30 / students € 25.
Get your tickets here

Making music in the moment, listening and responding, following and counteracting in the here and now – that’s what music improvisation is all about. In SPACE ACADEMY, world-renowned improv musicians tell all about their methods, techniques and experience. Check the whole program here.

Presented in partnership with Romanian Cultural Institute

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When Romanian-born pianist Lucian Ban and Grammy-nominated violinist Mat Maneri joined up for a concert in an opera house in Targu Mures in the middle of Romania’s Transylvania region, the music was, as Jazz Times puts it, “as close as it gets to Goth jazz.” Released in 2013 by ECM Records, the Transylvanian Concert album features a program of self-penned ballads, blues, hymns and abstract improvisations, the whole informed by the twin traditions of jazz and European chamber music, and album has won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, including several Best Album of 2013 awards, and has spawned continuous touring. Tonight they will play music from that album and premiere new music for a follow up album: Sun Ra & Paul Motian re-imagined pieces, Transylvanian doinas, re-constructed Enesco and Bartok pieces, original compositions, microtonal songs and more.

Mat Maneri & Lucian Ban will discuss improvisation, how to approach playing together in a “jazz” context that is influenced by chamber music, blues or spontaneous playing.

It can be difficult to write about what we do as improvisers. Perhaps it’s easier to explain it through a series of questions we’ve been asking, ourselves. What is composition? What is chamber music? Is it repertoire, or rather an approach to creative collaboration?…  What is musical time? Is it linear? Cyclical? What is jazz when you remove its canonized instrumentation and approach?  What are the essentials in the musical language we like to present?
How do we evoke these ideas without mimicry? What do you call this music? Is it chamber music; is it jazz? Is it Mahler? Is it free improvisation?