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Posts tagged ‘Maria Schneider’

Mar 3

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Data mining with Maria Schneider

“It’s kind of nightmarish, what’s happening,” Maria Schneider said during her performance with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble at the Barbican last night. She was introducing the title piece from her most recent Grammy-winning double-album. And since 2019, when she wrote and recorded Data Lords, the nightmares have got a whole lot darker.

Half of the album is about the threat to humanity from the people who are scraping and exploiting our data, whether relating to consumer patterns or creative imaginations. In the past six years we’ve all grown more aware of the activities of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos. More aware, yes, but seemingly powerless (or unwilling) to halt the tightening of their grip.

The contrasting theme of the other half is the importance of the natural world and its phenomena, from birdsong to handmade objects to poetry. Again, it’s necessary only to read the news to appreciate the individually varying but generally increasing levels of threat.

She mixed up the pieces last night, starting with the powerful lyricism of “Bluebird”, its tone set by the accordion of Kalle Moberg. More sardonic and disquieting was “Don’t Be Evil”, which takes its title from Google’s extraordinary instruction to staff. As waves of brass were finessed down to a chamber trio, this was a demonstration of Schneider’s love of dynamic contrast.

Although she spent several early years as Gil Evans’s protégée, Schneider truly belongs to the genre of composer-arrangers who worked for Stan Kenton in the 1950s: people such as Pete Rugolo, Gene Roland and Bob Graettinger, creators of dramatic charts with plenty of space for fine, characterful soloists. In Schneider’s hands, such music doesn’t have the built-in flexibility associated with Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, Basie, Carla Bley, Mike Gibbs or, for that matter, Gil Evans, but its musicality and integrity are impeccable. Maybe Kenny Wheeler’s big-band writing is the closest comparison, but Schneider’s music is imbued with her own personality.

Last night’s selection of pieces was well served not just by the ensemble but by all the soloists, given outstanding support throughout from the supple double bass of Trygve Waldemar Fiske. It was amusing to note that the two women members of the 18-piece ensemble were playing bass trombone and baritone saxophone: between them, Ingrid Utne and Tina Lægrid Olsen were holding up the earth.

Olsen was memorably featured on “Sputnik”, her softly ruminating baritone charged with evoking the innocent wonder once felt by those old enough to remember going outside to see the first satellites (the forerunners of the Starlink system with which Musk can now, should he so wish, control world wars). As she brought her spellbinding solo gently back down from its low orbit, the tone poem closed with one of those tapered endings — a sort of whispered catharsis — in which the composer specialises.

“I don’t want to leave you with the annihilation of humanity,” Schneider said, introducing the encore, the sweet waltz of “Braided Together”, which she prefaced by reading Ted Kooser’s short poem “december 29”: a flicker of candlelight offering hope amid the gathering gloom.

* Maria Schneider’s Data Lords is on the crowdfunded ArtistShare label. I took the photograph above after the performance had ended.

Sep 27

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Maria Schneider’s ‘Data Lords’

Amid the flood of music commenting on the various crises confronting our world in the twenty-first century, it’s interesting to see that some of those who work with conventionally structured big bands are finding new ways to make their voices heard. In 2016, Darcy James Argue’s Real Enemies explored the paranoia of a society under surveillance while the Liberation Music Orchestra released Time/Life, in which Charlie Haden and Carla Bley did for environmental concerns what they had previously done for political protest movements. Now comes Maria Schneider’s Data Lords, a series of pieces in which the American composer expresses her disquiet over where the unscrupulous use of technology and our carelessness with the earth’s resources are leading us.

“I mourn the loss of our internal landscapes just as I mourn the loss of our external landscapes,” she writes in the notes. Data Lords not a sermon. It’s music, finely wrought: a suite of 11 movements, divided in two, on a pair of CDs. But it does have driving impulses. The first disc, The Digital World, reacts to the threat posed by mass data collection and artificial intelligence (in her notes, she quotes Stephen Hawking’s claim that beyond a certain point in the evolution of AI, it will turn on humanity and destroy it). The second, Our Natural World, reflects on what we stand to lose unless we find a way of turning back the tide of destruction.

Schneider was a pupil of Gil Evans, whose benign influence can be heard in the care with which she selects and combines her textures, with a special emphasis on rich and resonant writing for brass. Like him, she is brilliant at creating settings for the individual soloists among the 18-piece band on this recording. Those who distinguish themselves in their featured slots include the altoists Steve Wilson and Dave Pietro, the trombonist Ryan Keberle, the tenorists Rich Perry and Donny McCaslin, the baritonist Scott Robinson, the trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, the pianist Frank Kimbrough, the accordionist Gary Versace, the guitarist Ben Monder, the bassist Jay Anderson and the drummer Johnathan Blake.

The mood on the first disc is predominantly dark, ominous, fretful. Monder opens “A World Lost” with ruminative flights of sustain and light-touch distortion that show how profoundly Jimi Hendrix has influenced younger guitarists. McCaslin is eloquent on “CQ, CQ, Is Anybody There?” and Robinson is marvellously affecting on “Sputnik”, delivering pathos without sentimentality. The track “Data Lords” features Rodriguez making imaginative use of electronics over sombre writing that coils its tensions in a manner recalling some of Mingus’s late big-band pieces, with Anderson and Blake providing a free-flowing commentary.

The pieces on the second disc variously celebrate a temple in Kyoto, the work of the potter Jack Troy, the night sky, the words of the poet Ted Kooser, and birdlife. The mood is lighter, gentler, more optimistic, the tone set on the opening “Sanzenin” by Versace’s nimble, piping accordion: the sound of wind through reeds, the gentle swells of the brass and reeds echoing the surge of the instrument’s bellows. “Look Up” is a vehicle for Gilkes’s burnished tone and liquid articulation, over a gloriously mellow groove, while Pietro shines on the glowing “Braided Together”.

Concluding her notes, Schneider observes: “The internet doesn’t have to be all about secret surveillance, data exploitation, overreaching terms of use, and systems designed to make every human addicted to their services. It can be used to assist us all in making the world a better place.” She’s doing her bit, and Data Lords is highly recommended as a vigorous, vital, imaginative and lustrously beautiful part of the soundtrack to our times.

* The photograph of Maria Schneider is from the booklet accompanying Data Lords, and is by Briene Lermitte. The beautifully packaged album was made through and is available from ArtistShare, which facilitates fan-funded projects: http://www.artistshare.com