Brandon Lopez Trio featuring Mat Maneri and Randy Peterson

Brandon Lopez

Brandon Lopez (b. 1988) is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise, and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times).

From the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music, including Fred Moten, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tony Malaby, Tyshawn Sorey, Bill Nace, Tom Rainey, Cecilia Lopez, Sun Ra Arkestra, Susan Alcorn, Mette Rasmussen, and many others. As a sideman, he has been dubbed “the ubiquitous.” Current work is with the Nate Wooley 4tet, William Parker’s Little Huey Orchestra, Weasel Walter Large Ensemble, Leila Bordreuil Quartet for Bass trio and Cello Solo, The Jaimie Branch Trio, Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, amongst many others.

Lopez attended New England Conservatory of Music, studying under the great Joe Morris, and was recently awarded a grant by the Foundation for Contemporary Art for his guitar trio piece Movement. For his St. Louis debut, Lopez will lead this trio composed of Mat Maneri (violin/viola) and Randy Peterson (drums).

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Mat Maneri

Mat Maneri, a leading improvisational voice of his generation, was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He began studying the violin at the age of five, but since borrowing a viola for a jam session at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, he has made the viola his instrument of choice. Important influences on Maneri’s work – in addition to all the major forces of jazz – include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and educator Joe Maneri. Of his studies with Koff, Mat Maneri has said: “Studying Baroque music helped me to find my sound. [Koff] brought me into the world of contrapuntal playing and a way of using the bow that sounded more like a trumpet, like Miles, to my mind.”

Randy Peterson

Far from the spectacle of music, drummer Randy Peterson has been quietly cultivating a singular approach to pulse and time that is both deeply profound and mysteriously idiosyncratic. Peterson spent numerous years working with pioneering microtonal free jazz saxophonist Joe Maneri, often in a quartet with son Mat Maneri (violin/viola) and double bassists Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. Decades of work with the Maneris provided a context for Peterson to develop his esoteric approach to drumming – a microtonal translation from the melodic to the rhythmic he calls the Rhythmic Continuum.

Peterson has appeared on several albums with both Joe and Mat Maneri on the Leo, Hat Hut and ECM labels. Other collaborators include saxophonist Tony Malaby, double bassist Nate McBride, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and double bass maestro Michael Formanek.