Search - Joe Maneri :: In Full Cry

Saxophonist and clarinetist Joe Maneri has spent most of his multidecade career as a teacher and music theorist, a biographical fact you would never surmise after listening to his music. So complete is Maneri's vision of his instruments that he sounds as if he's made dozens of CDs instead of his precious few. His best CD yet, In Full Cry, lives plentifully up to its title. Maneri plays an efficiently microtonal sax and clarinet, often bursting into upper-register yawps. He finds notes between notes and shades between nuances, never hurrying and ever fueled by his son Mat's wide-angle electric violin. Rounding out Maneri's quartet are drummer Randy Peterson and bassist John Lockwood, who lay planks of rhythmic solidity and provide fluid meshwork beneath the music's itinerant leaps. All seasoned avant-gardists, these four make a yearning prettiness out of their music, expressing a categorical sense of the intersection between microtonalism and post-free jazz. --Andrew Bartlett