Joe Maneri Quartet

Despite producing relatively few recordings, clarinetist Joe Maneri left a striking mark on the textures of modern music. A modest collection of solo pieces and paired sessions with his son Mat augmented his associations with experimental players such as Joe Morris. Extending into his seventies, his path absorbed influences from jazz, intimate ensemble writing, and spiritual concerns that likely took shape during his earlier street preaching in Brooklyn. His reed technique, charged with restless energy, dissolved artificial separations among genres by coaxing apparently unattainable sonorities from the instrument. One of his most enduring achievements, however, may have been the guidance he offered Mat, whose own commanding violin and viola work extended the father’s creative trajectory in fresh directions.

In addition to integrating fluidly into the elder Maneri’s microtonal explorations, Mat also preserved and circulated Joe’s performances, most prominently through a group of 1993 recordings by the Joe Maneri Quartet. The material began appearing with the Leo label’s 1995 release Get Ready to Receive Yourself, which presented the quartet—Joe and Mat joined by bassist John Lockwood and drummer Randy Peterson—to listeners interested in avant jazz and creative improvisation. Later in the decade the Swiss Hat Hut and Hatology imprints drew further from the same 1993 dates for the limited-edition 1996 album Dahabenzapple, featuring Cecil McBee on bass instead of Lockwood, as well as 1997’s Coming Down the Mountain and 1999’s Tenderly, both employing bassist Ed Schuller. Issued by ECM in 1997, the quartet’s In Full Cry documented a German studio session from June of the preceding year that once again included Lockwood on bass.