Blessed is the first duo album by Joe Maneri and his son Mat Maneri, the American improvisers whose music moves freely through the microtones between the notes of the tempered scale. Father and son had been playing together for about twenty-two years, since Mat was seven, and every group they led grew out of that partnership. Here the bass and drums of their quartet fall away and the duo is heard as a chamber music of its own.
Joe Maneri, clarinettist, saxophonist, pianist, composer and theorist, taught at the New England Conservatory and was president of the Boston Microtonal Society. He was in his early seventies and new to ECM. His first albums there were the trio Three Men Walking with Joe Morris and the quartet album In Full Cry. On this disc he plays alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet and piano. Mat plays acoustic violin, an electric six-string violin, a baritone violin and an electric five-string viola, the electric instruments built for him by Tucker Barrett of Vermont. The session was recorded in October 1997 at Hardstudios in Winterthur, with Martin Pearson engineering and Steve Lake producing.
Most of the twelve pieces are joint improvisations, from the eleven-minute From Loosened Soil to the brief Race You Home. Mat plays Body and Soul alone on acoustic violin, a strange and gripping account of the standard. With Joe at the piano, the spiritual Never Said a Mumblin' Word takes on a wild, gospel-tinged intensity. Gardenias for Gardenis is Joe's short solo clarinet homage to Charlie Gardenis, described in ECM's note as "the Bird of the Greek clarinet". Sixty-One Joys features Mat's electric baritone violin.
In AllMusic, Thom Jurek wrote that the album "has within it the basis of a new study of harmonic improvisation". He found it remarkable for its "close dancing with the infinite". Joe himself put the stress elsewhere: "If I play a thousand microtones, what's that worth if the rhythm isn't happening". On ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo heard the family bond in the playing and described how "the search is itself the pulse".
CD, ECM 1661, first released by ECM Records in 1998.
