LitFest 2024: Transylvanian Folk Songs Meet Jazz Poetry with Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, Joy Priest, & the International Writing Program

What’s a festival at City of Asylum without a little collaboration? In this combination concert and reading, not unlike our classic jazz poetry performances, renowned musicians Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri perform tracks from their latest record, Transylvanian Dance, which they will be touring with throughout the U.S. this fall. Included in the set is an improvisational collaboration with Pittsburgh poet Joy Priest and poets Phodiso Modirwa, Nicholas Wong, and Felipe Franco Munhoz from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. 

More than a decade since they started working together as a duo, Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri are heralded for their amalgamations of Transylvanian folk with improvisation, their mining of 20th Century European classical music with jazz, and for their pursuit of a modern chamber jazz ideal. The two musicians first worked together in 2009 in the Enesco Re-Imagined octet that was conceived as a celebration and a contemporary jazz re-imagination of the works of the great Romanian composer George Enescu. 

In 2013, ECM Records released the Maneri & Ban duo album Transylvanian Concert that was widely acclaimed for “its original voice and unorthodox beauty.” It was followed in 2020 by their radical recasting of the Transylvanian folk songs from the Bela Bartok Field Recordings with legendary reed player John Surman. By year’s end, Transylvanian Folk Songs ended up on NPR 2020 Jazz Critics Poll, on Balkan World Music Charts, New York City Jazz Record BEST OF 2020, and more. 

About the Musicians:

Lucian Ban is a Romanian born, NYC based pianist & composer known for his amalgamations of Transylvanian folk with improvisation, his mining of 20th Century European classical music with jazz, and his pursuit of a modern chamber jazz ideal. His music has been described as “emotionally ravishing” (Nate Chinen, New York Times/WBGO), a “triumph of emotional and musical communication” (All About Jazz), and as holding an “alluring timelessness and strong life-force” (Downbeat Magazine). Lucian was raised in a small village in northwest Transylvania and studied composition at the Bucharest Music Academy while simultaneously leading his own jazz groups. Desire to get closer to the source of jazz brought him to the U.S., and since moving to New York in 1999, his ensembles have included many of New York’s finest players. His second album with ELEVATION quartet Songs from Afar featuring Abraham Burton, John Hebert, and Eric McPherson won a DOWNBEAT 5 Star Review and BEST ALBUM OF THE YEAR in 2016. His duet with violist Mat Maneri, Transylvanian Concert, was released by ECM Records in 2013 and won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, including several Best Album of 2013 awards. 2022 saw the release of his first piano solo album, Ways of Disappearing, a mesmerizing collection of improvisations and originals that is reviewed glowingly in The Wall Street Journal, Downbeat, and New York City Jazz Record. He has recorded 20 albums as a leader for labels such as Sunnyside, ECM, Jazzaway, and more. More info at www.lucianban.com

Mat Maneri has defined the voice of the viola and violin in jazz and improvised music over the course of a twenty-five year career. Born in Brooklyn in 1969, Maneri has established an international reputation as one of the most original and compelling artists of his generation, praised for his high degree of individualism and his work with 20th century icons of improvised music. Important influences on Maneri’s work include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great musician, composer, and educator Joe Maneri. Maneri possesses an immediately recognizable sound which marries the distinct worlds of jazz and microtonal music in a fluid, remarkably expressive fashion which The Wire dubbed “endlessly fascinating.” In 1990, Mat co-founded the legendary Joe Maneri Quartet with his father, drummer Randy Peterson and bassists Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. The quartet’s recordings for ECM Records, Hatology and Leo Records were widely acknowledged by critics and fellow musicians as among the most important developments in 20th century improvised music. Maneri’s 1999 solo debut on ECM Records marked his emergence as a musician with a singular, uncompromised voice, reflecting a growing consensus of Maneri as a central figure in American creative music. Since then, the long list of musicians with whom he has worked includes icons such as Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Paul Motian and William Parker, as well as influential bandleaders such as Joe Morris, Vijay Iyer, Matthew Shipp, Marilyn Crispell, Joelle Leandre, Kris Davis, Tim Berne and Craig Taborn. More info at Mat Maneri @ ECM

About the Poets:

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diasporic Poetry on the faculty of Pitt’s MFA program and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at its Center for African American Poetry & Poetics.

Phodiso Modirwa is the author of Speaking in Code, a chapbook published by Akashic Books as part of the Tisa: New-Generation African Poets box set. She performed at the inauguration ceremony of the current president of Botswana, and her work has received the Botswana President’s Award in Contemporary Poetry. Modirwa’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in adda, Guernica, Brittle Paper, Lolwe, Agbowó, 20.35 Africa, and other literary magazines. In 2022, she was a resident poet at the Gaborone Art Residency Centre. Her participation is made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (2021), which was a finalist for the same award. He was also the winner of Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2018. His poems and translations have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Griffith Review, The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, Wasafiri, and World Literature Today, among others. Wong has also contributed writings to projects organized by the Manchester International Festival and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He currently teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong. His participation was made possible by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.

Felipe Franco Munhoz is the author of Dissoluções [Dissolutions] (2024), Lanternas ao nirvana [Lanterns to Nirvana] (2022), Identidades [Identities] (2018), and Mentiras [Lies] (2016). He has translated works by Ivan Turgenev, Samuil Marshak, and Alexander Pushkin. He is the recipient of a Santa Maddalena Foundation fellowship and residencies with Art Omi, Sangam House, and the Festival Artes Vertentes. His participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

About IWP:

The International Writing Program (IWP) is a unique conduit for the world’s literatures, connecting well-established writers from around the globe, bringing international literature into classrooms, introducing American writers to other cultures through reading tours, and serving as a clearinghouse for literary news and a wealth of archival and pedagogical materials. Since 1967, over 1,600 writers from more than 160 countries have been in residence at the University of Iowa. The IWP’s principal program is its Fall Residency, which is designed for established and emerging creative writers — poets, fiction writers, dramatists, and non-fiction writers. The Residency provides writers with time, in a setting congenial to their efforts, for the production of literary work. It also introduces them to the social and cultural fabrics of the United States, enables them to take part in American university life, and creates opportunities for them to contribute to literature courses both at the University of Iowa and across the country.