Lucian Ban: Following Bartók's Trail Through the Transylvanian Villages

It is hard to re-invent where jazz can go. Players can eschew all the conventional methods they want, but a wheel is still a wheel. This is a reason why pianist Lucian Ban's efforts to bring to light the Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist Bela Bartók's works as a field collector of folk music in 21st-century terms are so important and riveting. Ban expands on these recordings, which were stored on notebooks and wax cylinders, with ancillary writings and photos that foster a profound immersion on the two albums he has led—Transylvanian Folk Songs: The Bela Bartók Field Recordings (Sunnyside, 2020) and Transylvanian Dance (ECM, 2024). "The Béla Bartók Field Recordings is a very close-to-the-heart project for me as it deals with his folk research in Transylvania where I grew up," Ban related enthusiastically. "He literally collected in villages next to the one where I spent my childhood."

The first album was recorded as a trio with Mat Maneri and British reedsman John Surman. Two more albums with this trio—Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert—will come out in 2025 on Sunnyside, and there is a quartet recording to come out at some undetermined date. There are a couple of video excerpts on YouTube from concerts in Europe at Zenehaza Hall in Budapest and the Athenaeum in Bucharest. Along with the ECM album, they all deal with Bartók's folk collection of peasant music that Ban reimagines in his own way, similar to what he did with 20th-century classical genius George Enescu's work as Enescu Re-Imagined (Sunnyside, 2010). "Bartók own compositional vision was forever changed by the folk collecting he did in Transylvania," Ban affirmed. "The string quartets and other works are bearing witness to this."

Ban grew up under the brutal communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, which ended in 1989 with the revolution in Timișoara that resulted in the execution of the dictator and his wife, Elana. Ban was 20-years-old at the time and had moved from the small village of Teaca to study piano and composition in Cluj. He continued his education at the Bucharest Academy and established the group Jazz Unit before moving to New York City in 1999 and entering the New School to continue his studies. It was there he met saxophonist Alex Harding, beginning a three-decade personal and professional friendship that has resulted in several recordings, starting with Something Holy (CIMP, 2002) then Premonition (CIMP 2004), Tuba Project feat. Bob Stewart (2005), Alex Harding's The Calling (Jazzaway 2006), Dark Blue (Sunnyside 2019) and Blutopia (Sunnyside, 2024), a quintet with Maneri, Bob Stewart and Brandon Lewis. "Jazz was underground in Romania, like some strange animal," Ban said. "But it did provide a gate of freedom for some people. That was before I came to play jazz, of course, but I felt the freedom."

Ban's playing is at once dynamic, appealing, fun, adventurous and unique. Listening to as many of his recordings as possible before this interview, you could hear him caressing the air with the tenderness of a lover's whisper. Or you'll hear the keys, like veins, pulsing with the rhythms of incredible emotion, sending waves of vibrant sound to dance before wrapping around the listener like a warm embrace on a chilly evening. Each stroke of the keys conjures a tempest of passion, yet within lies a tenderness where the heart finds solace, cradled by the ebb and flow of melodies.

His masterful style grew from its roots going all the way back to Ban's first experience with jazz. "I heard the earthy playing of Dollar Brand combined with the free passion of Gato Barbieri in one album called Hamba Khale (MN, 1968). The title is a Zulu term for 'farewell, go in peace.'" This could aptly describe Ban's departure from Romania and his return years later, drawn by the desire to explore the Transylvanian folk music by following the breadcrumbs left on the trail through the villages by Bartók.

All About Jazz: I am very interested in how the field recordings were collected by Bela Bartók for your record Transylvanian Dance. Did he go around to the villages?

Lucian Ban:This project has been going on for six years, and it's produced by an organization in Transylvania and Romania. It involves other stuff aside from our recordings, like an exhibition. So, that gave us the opportunity to work with Bartók archives in Budapest and to learn about his work. Bartók was one of the first ones that started this discipline of ethnomusicology and field recordings at the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. They used the Edison phonograph and wax cylinders. And he, together with a few other people that are not household names, they basically started this whole idea of collecting folk because they heard things in the music that spoke to them.

He would go on a week or 10-day trip and stay in little inns to go to the villages and try to convince the peasants old and young to sing for him. The work he did is extraordinary in size, not only in depth, but only in Transylvania. He collected by himself between 1909 and 1917 over 3,500 songs and transcribed them. And that's only Romanian folk music. He also collected Hungarian music, Slovakian music. He went to North Africa, to Turkey. All in all, he collected over 10,000 folk songs and wrote about them and annotated them through the last years of life in New York around 1945. He was a renaissance man. He's rightly so known as the genius composer, one of the greatest. But his work as a musicologist and folk collector, it's not so much known. He influenced everybody after him to Alan Lomax and all of those cats.

AAJ: It is incredible how one person could do so much. John Hartford collected well over 1000 fiddle songs, but that doesn't even come close.

LB: What's extraordinary is they leave us with this repository. Just the idea to be able to hear little girls singing from over a hundred years ago. The quality of the recording is bad, but how raw and how real are those songs. Same like the Appalachian songs, same like Lomax did. It's an extraordinary thing. And they can teach us so much.

AAJ: How did you get access to them?

LB: We had access to the PDF versions that were published after Bartók died by an American musicologist that handled his estate. During his life, he published three or four groups of studies with all in all, I think 600 songs out of the 3500. All of these were published in 1965 as Romanian Folk Music by this guy, Benjamin Suchoff, who also collected his writings. The essays are extraordinary. He actually wrote about American folk music in Virginia. There's a lecture he did at Harvard University. The books are out of print. They're five volumes of 600 pages each. You can find them in some libraries and you can find them on eBay or Amazon for $6-700 per volume. We printed 200 scores from the PDFs, and then I would go to Mat Maneri's place here in Park Slope. We both live here in Brooklyn. We would play through them, and the ones that spoke to us, we would keep them. It would be impossible to go through the whole collection. During the first installment, which we did with John Surman, the great British saxophonist, I think we went over 150 then paired down to 60 and ended up playing the 12 on the first album. We will be releasing two more albums with John Surman, which are live recordings from the last years. We were fortunate to be able to tour with John until he retired. And we recorded that last concert at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, which is like a Carnegie Hall. We got to tour really nice venues because John is so renowned in Europe. Several of these were recorded professionally and they will be on the upcoming Cantica Profana and the aforementioned The Athenaeum Concert (LP only release) that are coming out on Sunnyside in September 2025. We recorded another quartet with John, and we are working to do a new installment with Gerald Cleaver.

AAJ: It is always amazing to hear how many recordings artists such as yourself make—duo, trio, quartet, all sorts of combinations with different players.

LB: If you think about it, that's our life. It's what we do. We're trying to make a living, so you have to do many projects. But it's what we love to do.

AAJ: Tell us a little about how you started. Was there music in the home?

LB: My father died in 2020, and my mom is still alive living in Transylvania. She's almost 80, and they grew up in the '60s. And even though it was Communist in Romania, my father loved American music. There was a lot of, not so much jazz, but what you would call r&b, the classic era of r&b from Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, some of the blues singers. And my father studied bassoon, but he never went on to pursue a musical life. I discovered the piano on my own and took some lessons. Then I encountered a pianist that I did not know who mesmerized me and made me actually discover jazz. That pianist is the South African Abdullah Ibrahim.

AAJ: Back then he was not known as Ibrahim.

LB: Exactly, he was Dollar Brand. I went full hearted into his music. And I was lucky to have a mentor and some access to a real history of the music from people that had big collections. He would say you have to listen to his masters, which are Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. I knew the history of this music though not how to play that well. Before I left, I had my own band touring Romania. It was a mix of—now I'm looking to those albums that are long out of print—Africana and Sun Ra, the hard-bop and post-bop of the '60s. In 1989, the regime fell and Romania became free. The jazz program started in 1994 there at the Bucharest Conservatory of Music. I studied composition with Anatol Vieru, one of Romania's most renowned classical contemporary composers. And then in 1999 I got a scholarship to the New School and moved to New York where I've been ever since.

AAJ: Did moving to America change the way you heard music?

LB: Of course it did. But this is an interesting question because when I first moved here, I kind of erased my what's the word? Memory? Consciously, I turned my back on the culture where I was coming from. I really wanted hardcore jazz, whatever that meant. I was really into Andrew Hill, really everything here. Discovering New York City and trying to make a name for myself, trying to get by, trying to get gigs, all of that. Then I did a BMI composer workshop that was run by Jim McNeely. They would teach arranging and once a month, they would get the Vanguard Orchestra to play what the students wrote.

I remember I was at the local 8 0 2, the musicians local in New York, and they were playing my chart and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, I like how it sounds, but you are not from the States. It sounds like Bartók or something from Eastern Europe. He didn't figure out that I'm from Romania. That guy was Rufus Reid, the great bassist who was taking the same course as me. After I recorded my first album here with Alex Harding (Somethin' Holy, CIMP, 2002), then I did Premonition (CIMP, 2003) with him and Erik Torrente on alto sax, bassist Chris Dahlgren and drummer Damion Reid. Then I did another quintet with Bob Stewart and Tuba. These were all really anchored in a certain stream of the tradition. But all of these explorations of mine, trying to play and get on the scene, what characterized them is that there was nothing from where I come from.

AAJ: What happened from there?

LB: Then I got a commission from a classical festival in Bucharest to reimagine the music of George Enesco for a jazz octet. Together with bassist John Hébert, we able to get some of the best cats here in New York: I got Badal Roy on tabla, Ralph Alessi trumpet, Mat Maneri on viola, Albrecht Maurer on violin and Tony Malaby on tenor saxophone. Enescu Re-Imagined is out of print now. It was a good challenge but more importantly, it brought me back to where I come from. Then there was another commission dealing with folk music, and that was with Sam Newsome, the soprano player. We got a grant to study some Romania folk music and write a suite of music. The Romanian-American Jazz Suite (Jazzaway Records, 2008) came out on a label in Norway that doesn't exist anymore. That was Sam's child; he arranged 70% of the music. Initially, I didn't want to deal with this because I was still with Andrew Hill and Paul Bley in my mind. But when I saw what he was doing with the folk music of my country, I said, Sam, give me back the books I sent you with the folk music and let me arrange some.

I was lucky and blessed to be able to work with some of the best on the group Elevation: Abraham Burton saxophone, John Hebert, and Eric McPherson on drums. We were in Europe on tour, but we ended up in Transylvania. After the concert, the promoter took us to dinner. His daughter was almost like a teenager asking "Pop, sing them something." This guy was a larger-than-life character. He loves life and loves music, and he had a stunning voice. He knew some folk songs from the area I grew up in that I never heard. The guy starts singing, and in few minutes, I see John and Abe almost having tears in their eyes. Of course, they also had some local brandy, so it was a good time. Abraham said, "Lush, we have to do something with these songs."

So, I said, okay. I asked the guy if he could record these songs. He told me he had to have some brandy to drink to get his courage out. And he recorded acapella 10 songs. He sent them to me and we arranged them here. They came out in 2006 on the Songs from Afar album on Sunnyside. That album got tremendous feedback, though it was a surprise. Mat Maneri joined our quartet and the singer's name is Gavril Tarmure.

There's a commonality because jazz music started as a sort of a folk music. Then the project with the Bartók collection was a full circle for me in terms of bringing together my love for American jazz and improvised music to the culture where I come from. Now, especially after the six years of working with Mat and John Surman, I'm much more at ease as to who I am as a musician.

We are jazz musicians. We are improvisers. We are not folk musicians redoing folk songs.

AAJ: What is it about Mat Maneri that you connect with so well? When you play as a duo, it almost sounds as if he is playing two instruments.

LB: It's strange. Our encounter came about by the fact that I wanted a different musician for Enescu Re-Imagined. I wanted Erik Friedlander on cello, and in the end, he couldn't do it. Someone said, you should call this great viola player. I knew the name but never played with him. We didn't have time to do many rehearsals with all these people being busy. And I remember on one of Enescus' Sonatas, the third, which is a famous 20th century sonata for violin and piano, the first movement we did with the octet. I remember writing on the score piano and viola improvise upfront, and then the band comes in. We are at the George Enescu Festival, which is like Spoleto in Charleston. We get on stage and we play the setlist and Mat and I are playing that two-minute introduction for the first time ever. Immediately after the concert, we agreed we have to do more playing.

He functions in a world that is more experimental. And his father Joe Maneri, with the microtonal thing, the looseness and the way they looked at music, that freed me up in a way. It was a very blessed encounter because first of all, we are the same age, born in 1969, and even though we grew up in different regimes, we are similar in our ways. We became very close friends. We toured all over the world, starting with the first album we did for ECM in 2013. There is something in Mat that is truly brilliant in the way he plays. There is a looseness to his playing, and he has the ability to make any context that he plays good. He sounds like a folk eastern European fiddle player even though he was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Massachusetts. He told me that growing up, his father would play Greek and Sephardic music. All of that was part of his experience and his interest in the folk music around the world and different techniques that we use from African to Moroccan to Arabic to Indian. That made him in a way ideal to play folk songs. But we are jazz musicians. We are improvisers. We are not folk musicians redoing folk songs like roots Americana.

We come from our love for the jazz vernacular or whatever you want to call it. Mat also freed me in terms of composing, because with him, I was able to get out of a certain way of looking at writing original material that comes out of the great jazz tradition in the '50s and '60s. When you write today for a combo, you are still anchored in that. And it's such a tremendous tradition. I mean, you can spend your entire life and you would still not touch the depth of what's happened there. But Mat is actually bringing an angle of music that is larger than just this tradition. We can use what we learned from jazz and apply it to 12-tone music or apply it to what Evan Parker does or what Paul Bley did, or what it means to play a doinya or a Greek song or a Sephardic song and bring them somehow together. He showed me all that.

Would you say you brought some structure to his experimental nature?

It's hard for me to say but, maybe, yes. I mean, I was playing tunes and he's wrongly boxed into being a free player, but he's not. He loves to play different ways. The first duo album for ECM was all originals, and it was a different take on the blues. Manfred Eicher called it Transylvanian Concert and it was a good call for him. But we would play Wayne Shorter tunes on tour that never made it onto albums. We swing very hard; we groove very hard. So that comes from our love for jazz music.

AAJ: How receptive have your audiences been to the field recordings?

LB: I have a funny story from a club here in New Jersey where I played with the Alex Harding Quartet years ago. The club is called Cecil's because of the owner, Cecil Brooks, the drummer in Montclair. Unfortunately it's not around anymore. And it was in a neighborhood where black folks mostly live. So, the patrons were mostly black folk. We play and finish the set, and I'm at the bar getting a glass of water or something, and this older lady that was dressed almost like coming from the church, and she said, I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy the music and how much I like you playing. You have the blues. You must be from the South—of America, she meant. Alex Harding is passing by and he's outraged. From the South! He's not even from the States; he's from Romania. And the lady clearly did not know where Romania is, but she looked at Alex, then she looked at me and said, you must be from the South of Romania. I'll never forget this older woman who just wanted to hear some jazz. That was the best compliment anyone has ever given me.

AAJ: Were the songs Bartók collected just scores?

LB: They were just scores. I can share with you some of his handwriting so you can see them. Some of them were instrumentals and some of them were vocal and he would have lyrics. He learned Romanian even though he's Hungarian. There are no titles to these songs, just numbers. And there's a cataloging system that he had. We put titles to the songs by looking at the lyrics. Or in the case like "Transylvanian Dance," I knew it was a spinning folk dance, so that's why I called it "Romanian Folk Song." It's actually called "The Stick Game." We found the original wax cylinder that is the source of Bartók's famous suite of Romanian Folk Dances.

AAJ: Is that like for The Enchanted Stag?

LB: Oh, you really went to the well. That one takes its name from Bartók's Cantata Profana, which is a stunning piece of work. It's a chorale and orchestral piece based on a Romanian carol. And here we go deep into what folk music actually is. That carol, and most of the carols that are ancient, we don't know where they come from. They're devoid of religious content. So, throughout centuries, they were not anymore about a divinity, God or whatever. So even though it's a carol, it's actually a story about a father who's a hunter and his ten sons who go out to hunt, and they pass over a bridge of a little river in the mountains that they were not supposed to pass. The spirits transform them into stags, and they try to come home. But because of the antlers, they cannot go into the house. The father keeps going to find his sons. He goes hunting, and of course he doesn't shoot them, and he calls them enchanted stags. So, there you have it.

AAJ: It is for orchestra and choir?

LB: Yes, it's for an orchestra and the choir is the main soloist, It is seamlessly a dialogue between the orchestra and the choir that tells this story. It's very raw. It's like Bartók himself, an extraordinary piece of music.

AAJ: The last is an instrumental called "Make Me Lord Slim and Tall."

LB: I am going to share with you a photo. Bartók bought one of the first commercial cameras and took that photo in a village in 1917. There are eighty photographs in the archives that Bartók took, and they let us use them. They're in the booklet of the first album, several of them. And the first one is the cover. What you see is his handwritten score for "Make Me Lord, Slim and Tall." On the right corner, it's written "Kincses." It's the village where he recorded them. And underneath you have "Rusandra 11" and "Susanna 13, Chiorean." These are two sisters. "Oh, Lord, make me, oh Lord, make me please, Lord make me." And that's on the musical staffs. And then in the lower left corner, Bartók puts the conclusion, "make me slim and tall." It is quite fantastic. A hundred years ago, it's still the human vanity. They still want to be slim and tall.

AAJ: On "Harvest Moon Ballad" you must have done a lot of arranging from the original.

LB: Yes, I would call it harmonizing, almost like a jazz ballad. But on "The Boyer's Doyna," when we improvise I'm using a turnaround that comes out of Duke Ellington, "Fleurette Africaine." It's like the blues. It's such an encompassing song form in Romania and Eastern Europe that are sung or played for someone who died, or missing the loved one. They can be very ornamental.

AAJ: Is it a lamentation in a way?

LB: Yes, it's a lamentation. They can also have a defined rhythmic structure. So, it's a genre in itself that that can reflect many diverse musical statements. It can be a slow one or it can be structured rhythmically, but it's almost like a blues. There are so many myriad forms of blues. It can stay on a chord; it can go to the 12-bar form or many other things.

AAJ: It's not like a common blues structure then with 7th chords?

LB: No, not in that respect. You depart from the core of the melody, and then you can make a lot of ornamentations, which becomes in itself the song. That's where the beauty of it is. The song itself is not that complicated, but the flourishes that you do around it, which is such a folk thing in itself, it's where the depth of the song is. So, there's a lot of stuff that we throw at these tunes. "Enchanted Stag" is such a simple melody. Mat wrote underneath it a 12-tone row. "Transylvanian Dance" is built on the Mixolydian scale. We're in different tonalities, but the piece come together with a groove with Mat flowing on top. So there's that figure, which is like a dance, a pattern I heard in my childhood.

We are not folk players that revive a certain repertoire. We are bringing our own thing. We like to improvise, we like to groove, we like to swing. Sometimes we like to put fancy chords underneath. On the upcoming Sunnyside releases, Mat and I wrote liner notes to explain what it meant to play these songs over a period of three or four years on the road with John Surman and how they changed. Because what we noticed, and it's fascinating, is that as we played them in concerts, festivals, wherever, we were changing them or they changed us, I don't know actually which one. The same songs that are recorded on the first one, Transylvanian Folk Songs with John (Surman), you would not recognize now.

AAJ: This the one that is coming in September (2025)?

LB: Yes. It's almost like there's a code embedded in Bartók's field recordings, and when the code comes out, it transforms the music. It transforms us. And I don't know how else to explain the fact that the same songs are so different. And we're not playing free. There are melodies and form. I know from studying this project and studying Bartók and reading more and more about him, that they changed completely his compositional vision. There are musicologists that analyzed Bartók in regard to his compositions. They said in 1914, he wrote "Cantata Profana," but from September to January, he made two trips to these villages. They went into the archives and found the songs that he collected and they made the connections. So, we know, and there is a PhD thesis, that his folk collecting changed the way he wrote for string quartet, like the fact that he wrote entire movements on all instruments for pizzicato only. That has never been done before in string quartet writing. It has a rawness of peasant folk music that it births with real life. We know it changed Bartók, and we are not comparing ourselves in the least with Bartok, but they changed us as we play them. The one that we called "Bitter Love Song" is so different four years later that we had to change the title. Because we're not playing the theme anymore. Now it's called "Evening In the Village" because it's so different.

We do it out of passion, not because it's popular.

AAJ: These are called live recordings but they sound like you are in a studio.

LB: There's the adrenaline and the authenticity of being in front of an audience. These were not studio tapes, including the ECM album. They took out all applauses on the first album. We left them after the last track. What has changed over the years as we played them is that I quit playing the piano as a piano. I started doing a lot of extended techniques on the strings, like muting the strings and using it more like a percussive instrument, like a cymbal or the ngoni, which is an African string instrument that Don Cherry brought into the jazz world first. This has not happened on the first album. Another thing is that Mat discovered that he can apply a Moroccan scale to it and it works in the patterns and intonation. He said he got this idea by playing with some Indian groups.

The challenge is to do it tastefully so it's not a gimmick. We don't fool ourselves. We exist in a niche where there's very little money. So, what we do, we do out of passion, not because it's popular. We do it for the real reason and in the right way. But once this is accepted, what is fascinating is that a Moroccan scale works on a Transylvanian folk song. There's an essay that Bartók wrote in 1921 called "The Relation Between Folk Music and the Art Music of Our Time." He discusses what folk music means to him and other composers and how it relates to writing what they called art music. He launches a theory that all folk music throughout the world comes from the same cell. Mat told me, for example, on "Make Me Lord Slim and Tall," he's using Korean stuff.

AAJ: You mentioned a code in the music. There's a tradition of using codes, but it's more biblical tradition. Leonard Cohen talked about that in an interview about his song "Hallelujah." The song structure relates to the lyrics, the minor fourth, the major fifth. It's very interesting.

LB: We look at it as more like spiritual than religious. Mat and I came to this conclusion, there's some sort of code in them. I don't know what to call it. When we let go, you get to a deeper level, an in the moment understanding what these songs meant for those people when they sang them. Bartók said peasant music is created by a community that is devoid of erudition. And he's right. These are not PhD people, the peasants. But yet he said the perfection of these miniature pieces is equal to the perfection of a large symphonic work. Why? There's something in those songs. There's a reason we relate to the Appalachian folk songs, to African folk songs, to blues. In the end, they are all folk songs.

AAJ: You speak of getting to a deeper level. Could you describe that?

LB: I mean, we've been on the road and it's not easy. We don't work at the high end of the industry. It's so hard touring and flying and sometimes the hotels are shitty. Presenters don't have money to book for two nights, so you fly and play the same day. You're tired and as you get older, it's not easy. But there's so much energy when we play, we forget about being tired. That's why we can do it. I think it has to do with something in these songs, and it's something in music and the way, and this is where it relates to jazz. No matter if you play this music or some standard, if you played right, you feel fulfilled and the tiredness and all the BS goes away.

AAJ: That sounds like how it is writing an article. When you are tired, you keep on and suddenly some energy comes to you.

LB: Exactly. I was watching TV with my wife last night, falling asleep, and then I went to write on the liner notes of the upcoming album and some energy came from the text. There are codes embedded in that as well. It's almost like a religious experience. That's a loaded word. In the liner notes, Mat says he's been asked when he was younger if there's a connection between religion and music. And he said, no, it's a secular thing. Even when people try to make it religious, it's for an agenda. But he also said as he grows older, he's not so sure. He thinks there's something spiritual about music that might not be defined as religion in a structured form but it's there. He said something about this when we made the duo record.

AAJ: Is that Oedipus Redux? One of the best songs is "Òu suis-je? Le Corbeau crie." In English: "Where am I? the crow cries."

LB: Yes, you probably know that this is our take on George Enescu's Oedipus opera. This was what Enescu called his magnum work, the one he considered the most important. It's a long opera, meaning it covers the entirety of Oedipus' life, which is covered in the writings of Sophocles. Act I is the story of "Oedipus Rex" and then in Act IV to Colonus when he dies. Enescu brought the whole arc of his life into one work. It's the reason why this opera is not so often produced because it is very long. The score is complicated. That was a madness project. We premiered it at the Lyon opera two weeks after we recorded Transylvanian Folk Songs. That's how destiny arranged it. Anyway, to the piece about the crow, at that point in the story Oedipus has visions. He was adopted and his adoptive father was told by the prophet that his son will kill him and marry his mother. His father freaked out and told one of the servants to take Oedipus to the woods and kill him. But the guy didn't kill him and gave him to a shepherd and from that shepherd, gets adopted by King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth. As he grows up, he gets visions, which tells him that he is not the child of his adoptive parents. And he goes to Delphi where an oracle tells him the same story and he departs home not to kill his parents. He thought they are his real parents. He's confused and at a crossroad. This is a classic thing in Greek mythology, a crossroads.

Then he sees the deity with three heads that points out the three roads that you can take. There's a crow there makes a desolate sound, and it's all very menacing. Oedipus is singing to himself, where am I? The raven is calling. Three paths by which can I escape my destiny. There's somebody who comes on one of these roads and an altercation ensues. He kills the person on the horse, and it's Laius his real father. This is the moment in the song, which again, I arranged like a sort of a jazz ballad using Enescu's material. This was a mad project. I think we covered 10% of the score. We still wanted to get the dramatic arc. Mat and I worked a lot on this because first of all, there's no authorized score of the opera, meaning, I mean, there is the original, but it has not been, what's the word?

AAJ: Is it to confirm it corresponds to the original?

LB: When we play Bach, we are not playing a facsimile of his original handwriting. There's a consensus to how the score looks, and it's written nicely. This happens to all works as they become known. But for Enescu's Oedipus, it doesn't exist yet. This one is huge, 600 pages. We had to decipher what he wrote, but you couldn't understand his handwriting. Plus, he wrote in the way the composer would write in the 19th century. The clefs for the instruments are not what they are today. You have to do a lot of research. We also lifted up parts of the music that spoke to us that we can arrange for us to improvise. Theo Blackman and Jen Shyu sing so beautifully.

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