by Glenn Siegel
It’s been over two years since pianist Lucian Ban has toured. Personal health issues, caring for his ailing mother, and, of course, the pandemic, have conspired to keep him off the road. For a working artist like Ban, that’s a lot to endure. As Ban told Larry Blumenfeld of the Wall Street Journal in a recent article, Ban started to wonder if he could still play. I’m here to report that the answer is a resounding “yes”.
Ban performed solo for 45 lucky souls at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, MA on Friday, April 27. He took full advantage of the gorgeous acoustics in the Museum’s Music Room, which he filled with ringing affirmation of music’s power to transcend the man-made ugliness of this world. His largely improvised, hour-long recital, mirrored his latest release on Sunnyside and his first ever solo record, Ways of Disappearing.
The music, which was organized into discreet pieces, encompassed many moods and styles. There was a fractured, Bud Powell-like bop fusillade taken at an impossibly fast tempo. We heard gorgeous, full bodied Romantic sections that, save for the modern harmony, would not have been out of place in a 19thcentury European salon. There were spontaneous compositions that spoke of the blues, and periods of dense, chromatically ambiguous chords juxtaposed with single notes that reverberated against the marble walls of the hall. Throughout, Ban posed more questions than he answered, only sometimes resolving the tensions he laid out.
Between each piece he paused for upwards of 15 seconds, seeming to contemplate his next move, deciding which idea would guide his impending improvisation. He performed two compositions: Annette Peacock’s, “Albert’s Love Theme” and Carla Bley’s, “Ida Lupino”, both of which have simple, beautiful melodies played at ballad tempo. They took my breath away.
Ban knows the music of the great musicians that precede him, including Paul Bley, who in the early 1960s began recording definitive versions of many Carla Bley compositions. To my ears, “Ida Lupino” stands with her “Jesus Maria,” as two of the most haunting melodies I’ve heard. We talked about the curious version Carla recorded on her album Dinner Music (1977), featuring a smooth, breezy, up tempo arrangement, replete with a silky Eric Gale guitar solo. As much as I’ve come to dig that version (and the whole album), I agree with Ban that the piece becomes more ravishing as the tempo slows. Over dinner, we discussed some of his other favorite pianists: Andrew Hill, Sun Ra, and Abdullah Ibrahim, all of whom stress emotion and ideas over speed and flash.
Ban was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Cristina Modreanu, a renown Romanian scholar and theater artist, who like her husband, splits time between Transylvania and Brooklyn. This was the first time in 25 years she has toured with him. She and theater scholar/Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page talked “shop”, and Page was gifted Modreanu’s handsome book about the last 30 years of Romanian theater history. Another fine example of artists extending webs of connection and building community.
The music of his homeland figures large in Ban’s work. His last visit to western Massachusetts came in 2016, on the heels of his riveting duet release with violist Mat Maneri, Transylvanian Concert (ECM). Through his Enesco Re-Imagined project (released on Sunnyside in 2010), Ban brought renewed interest to the music of Romanian composer George Enesco (1881-1955). One of my favorite recordings of the last few years is Ban’s Transylvanian Folk Songs (The Bela Bartók Field Recordings), featuring Maneri and the respected British saxophonist John Surman. The music we heard on Friday, however, only hinted at those folk roots; it was infused into the fabric of the music, but subtly expressed.
Ban is back. After this 7-stop northeast tour (supported by a South Arts’ Jazz Road grant), the pianist spends most of June in Romania, to continue his solitary barnstorm heralding Ways of Disappearing. But Ban is not disappearing at all; he is an active presence in modern music, carving his own path through jazz’s evolving landscape.