Yesterday would have been Joe Maneri's birthday. The first one since his passing last August.
I wanted to write about him yesterday, but I couldn't bring myself to face the significance of the day. There was a memorial service for him in New York. I was here in Massachusetts. When he died, in Massachusetts, I was in Utah. I can't seem to be in the right state at the right time.
In my last telephone conversation with him, last summer, we talked about his birthday, for some reason. He told me something I never knew: he was proud of the fact that he was born on 2-9-27, whereas Charlie Parker was born on the 29th, and Lester Young was born on the 27th. Eerily, both Parker and Young were born in August, the month Joe would die. In fact, Joe died three days shy of what would have been Young's 100th birthday.
Over the years, Joe would say certain sentences that seemed to me so inspired that I would write them down. I wish I did this more often. I did write down a sentence about Lester Young: "Every note that Lester Young played said, 'I love you.'"
Joe was a chameleon in the best sense. Sometimes he was Italian; sometimes he was German; sometimes he was a classical musician; sometimes he was a jazz musician. But when he was a jazz musician, he was REALLY a jazz musician – not some sort of imitation, like when a concert pianist plays Gershwin, or when an English boy choir sings an African-American spiritual. Joe was bona fide at all times – the antonym of counterfeit.
As an example: this is a story told to me by his son Mat the afternoon of the funeral (one of many anecdotes floating around 7 Maple Lane that bittersweet afternoon). One evening, the Joe Maneri Quartet – consisting of Joe, Mat, Randy Peterson on drums, and I'm not sure who the bass player was at the time of the story – were giving a concert. After the concert, Mat and Randy stayed up quite late. The next morning, Mat and Randy groggily descended to the breakfast table. There was Joe, eating breakfast. Now, before I go any further: I had many breakfasts with the Maneris and can attest, firsthand, that fresh garlic was not an unusual ingredient on the breakfast table. It wasn't every morning. But it was not at all unusual to have what Joe would call "Sicilian French Toast": bread dipped in egg and fried, in the regular way, but instead of butter and maple syrup, the condiments were olive oil, grated pecorino romano, salt, pepper, and fresh chopped garlic. Another permutation might be bread or toast dipped in olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and lemon juice. In any case, Mat and Randy sleepily arrived at the breakfast table, to see Joe with, in Mat's words, "a jelly donut in one hand and a clove of garlic in the other." Joe's response to their facial grimaces: "Man, you cats don't know what it's about."
Indeed, it was as a "cat" that the Joe Maneri of later years was most widely appreciated. And yet it was as the great classical composer that I always saw him. Joe had one of the rarest musical gifts I ever encountered. He could hear any piece of music – and I mean any piece – and he had the uncanny ability to know what the composer was doing. Maybe some rare musicians can do this with Palestrina, or with Mozart, or with Elliott Carter, or with Milton Babbitt, or with Pietro Mascagni. I personally witnessed Joe do it with all of them. Even my own music! I'll never forget the time we sat and listened to a CD of my "Suite Siciliana" for chamber orchestra. Mind you, he'd never heard the piece before. Well, every nuance in the music, even the most subtle one, could be seen in this reactions on his face. For a moment I wondered if he had actually composed the piece, not me.
The last piece of music he and I ever listened to was Al Jolson singing, "You Made Me Love You." Though Joe played this sort of music in his youth in Brooklyn, I doubt seriously that he listened to, or even thought about, this sort of genre for many years. And yet I will never, so long as I live, forget the radiance on his face. He bobbed his head at every musical nuance, as if he knew what was coming next, as if he himself had did the orchestration and was himself singing. His smile lit up not only that room, but my whole life. Because if music is to be felt any less strongly than this, what is the point?
Bohème Tonight
