The first time I saw violinist Mat Maneri was at the Willow Jazz Cafe, a small bar in a suburb outside Boston. He was playing in a trio with guitarist Joe Morris and, more notably, his father Joe Maneri, the great saxophonist and devout free improviser. They played an abstract, completely improvised set, with lines that could rise to flurries or insinuate themselves as lightly as paper cuts. It was an engrossing and, on the father-son side of the trio, intimate performance: even the Van Halen on the jukebox next door couldn't break the audience's total concentration.

Maneri's father may be his biggest influence. Both men explore a microtonal scale that Joe invented, which takes the twelve notes of the regular octave and slivers them into seventy-two. For the listener, this means the two musicians veer into nuances of pitch but hit them with a mapmaker's precision: the subtleties are decisive and codified. This makes the music demandingly cerebral; but a more important trait they share-- and the one that makes their music more engrossing than academic-- is the absolute passion that guides their technique. In his father's case, it's the boisterous tone that burbles through his saxophone and clarinet; for Mat, it's an intensity that can be searing. He plays with the deliberateness of a cigarette burning itself out.

Maneri had already appeared on some of the finest European art music labels-- ECM, Leo, and HatHut-- when he released Blue Decco for the Thirsty Ear Blue Series. That release put him on the tiny roster of America's most vital jazz imprint, and it was also his most accessible album to date, a joyful, trad-sounding jazz album that kicked off with a swinging rendition of "Hush Little Baby", before closing with a cover of Duke Ellington's "I Got It Bad", where Maneri pulled his notes so beautifully thin, he almost bled them dry.

Two years later he's released his second disc on the Blue Series, and it takes a far different approach. For Sustain, he wrote abstract compositions so stretched out and/or skeletal that they almost sound formless. As on Blue Decco, Maneri works with a quartet that includes some of downtown New York's finest: Gerald Cleaver on drums, Craig Taborn on keyboards, and William Parker on bass. On soprano sax, he adds featured guest Joe McPhee, the avant-jazz legend whose career is so crucial that the HatHut label was founded specifically to document his work. This is a stellar group of improvisers, but where Blue Decco hewed close to traditional jazz forms, Sustain emphasizes seamless group interplay: the band makes slow but unyielding progress, and each track smolders.

"Sustain" and "In Peace" float like clouds, while "Divine" moves in drawn-out shudders. Taborn mainly sticks to keyboards, and instead of adding blunt synth washes, he comps in subtle colors (as well as his patented deep-sea sonar pings). He melds with Maneri's electric viola, and as soloists, both men drift in and out of the spotlight: McPhee, more freewheeling, steps up assertively but doesn't disrupt the backdrop. The rhythm section only implies the beat, as Cleaver and Parker confidently circle the edges of the music.

But then there's "Nerve", which resembles Miles Davis' electric fusion. Not so much fast as blaring, it features Maneri and Taborn jamming with heavy distortion; Maneri employs what might be a wah-wah pedal to make his viola sound like a guitar. McPhee plays a funky solo through the clamor, and with Cleaver and Parker crashing inwards, the piece bottlenecks like a slow car crash.

Maneri separates the group tracks with five solo pieces (one per musician) that emphasize the raw sounds of each instrument. These blend into the program surprisingly well: the Maneri solo that opens the disc is engrossingly slow; Cleaver's, the most hypnotic, sounds like he's dragging a chain around his cymbal. McPhee falls short of playing actual notes, instead honing us in on the sound of his breath in his mouthpiece. Taborn's piano solo is more conventional but he lays on the sustain pedals to keep the notes hanging around him, and Parker plays an arco solo where his bowing is so deep it acquires physical girth, though his whistling overtones could etch glass.

It goes without saying that capturing improvisation like this in the studio is difficult, and although none of Maneri's discs has been less than solid, his two releases on the Blue Series stand out as the tightest, most exciting, and most accessible. Of course, his recordings with his dad are also essential-- their duo Blessed on ECM is a great Father's Day gift for dads who dig free improv-- but the Blue Series deserves credit for releasing the definitive documents of a rising talent.

-Chris Dahlen, December 11th, 2002