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Artist
Joe Maneri
12+ albums
experimentalAvant-Gardefree jazzjazz12-tone jazz
about
Joe Maneri (Joseph Gabriel Esther Maneri, February 9, 1927 – August 24, 2009) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist and composer. An Italian-American born and raised in Brooklyn, Maneri played clarinet and saxophone in various dance bands and on the Catskill circuit as a teenager, often performing traditional Greek, Turkish, and Syrian music or Klezmer at weddings and other gatherings. He would later incorporate some elements of such music in his own compositions. He studied with Josef Schmid (not the tenor but a conductor and student of Alban Berg) for a decade before being commissioned by conductor Erich Leinsdorf to write a piano concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which was rehearsed but never performed in concert. Maneri was impressed by the music of Arnold Schoenberg and organized a jazz ensemble that performed some twelve tone music. (His later music is, however, not in the twelve-tone technique.) In 1963, this quartet recorded a demo for Atlantic Records, due in part to Gunther Schuller's interest in Maneri. The recording was not released until 1998, when American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar — who had obtained a copy of the demo — played the music for composer John Zorn, who released the music on his Avant Records as Paniots Nine. The recording shows a synthesis of Maneri's experience with vernacular musics of American immigrants and his understanding of twelve-tone composition along with a developed style of "free" improvisation, analogous to the
