Double bassist Sarah Murcia and violist Mat Maneri have never performed together in a duet. The concert at the NFM will therefore be a new, interesting step on the common trail that these experienced artists are taking, and meditation is just one of many paths. How they will lead us and what we will listen to is unpredictable.

Murcia can safely be said to be a most famous French improvising double bassist, second only to  Joëlle Léandre. Before she chose this instrument, she learned to play the piano and cello. Why the double bass? Over the last twenty-five years, Murcia has shown herself in many endeavours as a versatile artist, open to a wide range of inspirations. She does not like hierarchy in music: she is just as keen on playing simple pieces as well as sophisticated works with complex structures. She has collaborated with the greats of jazz, but she also loves to perform songs that are closer to pop, rock, punk or electronica. Murcia is an excellent improviser, her music-making is full of ideas, temperament and initiative. The artist composes, arranges and sings.

When Murcia recalls her childhood, she talks about the fact that in her home they listened to a variety of music – jazz among others. Mat Maneri grew up in a home where jazz was performed: his father was Joe Maneri, an avant-garde saxophonist, composer and teacher. The young Mat was encouraged to learn to play the piano. However, he preferred a smaller instrument – he chose the violin, and at the beginning of his career it was his playing on it that caught the attention of the demanding jazz community in New York. Now he is also known as a violist because it is from the viola that he can – as he said in an interview for Jazz Weekly – extract “lower, solid sounds, the harmonic content of which is richer for me”. Today, his attention to detail and unconventional phrasing is obvious. Maneri’s playing was described colourfully – and accurately – in the Chicago Reader: “He has his own sound. With his mahogany tone and muscular low register, he glides from one note to another like a sated snake.” He owes his unique status to his method of combining elements of jazz, free improvisation and Baroque with microtonal music.