In Time

This date was the first meeting between violinist Mat Maneri and Greek pianist Pandelis Karayogis. As a work of restrained beauty and subtle textures and colors, it is nearly a masterpiece. Both players have a respect for what is held back, what is left silent in a piece of music. Perhaps this is the reason they chose to both open and close their program with Thelonious Monk's "Ugly Beauty" (numbers one and two). The intensity of listening here comes across immediately, as neither player seems interested in unnecessary dynamic or dramatic episodes. Instead, melody and counterpoint are the only places for engagement in this nearly mystical meeting between two minds so alike in their search for perfect microtonal improvisation it becomes a single point of focus. Given the spiritual presence of Monk, the album's original improvisations take on spectral, even ghostly pallor as well. Maneri is playing an electrified violin and carrying his sense of monody and the modal approach to melody Karayorgis whose shape-shifting sense of timbral elegance is both original and full of nuances gleaned from players like Bill Evans, Andrew Hill, and Randy Weston. The most beautiful thing here is Maneri's "Blue Seven," a spontaneous composition. Its haunting, lone violin line carries a lilting melody over eight measures in 4/8 time before Karayorgis enters, playing an elegiac series of chords and small tonal clusters that highlight Maneri's fragile, yet continuous melodic invention. Karayorgis isn't playing counterpoint so much as he is creating a counter-melody, based entirely on the intuition of where Maneri will take what he has left of his original statement. The piece, as it moves back and forth over 12 minutes, alternately sings and sobs over a small series of pitches and scales; it is heartbreakingly beautiful. This was an auspicious meeting of two young minds who had already in 1994 established their own voices on a burgeoning jazz improv scene.