Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Maria Schneider’s new release is a double album titled Data Lords.
(Photo: Briene Lermitte)As one of the top composer-arrangers on New York’s big band jazz scene, Maria Schneider has covered a vast swath of musical territory since her namesake orchestra began recruiting ace instrumentalists and captivating listeners in the early 1990s. Over a series of acclaimed recordings starting with her 1994 breakout album, Evanescence (Enja), Schneider’s writing style has evolved through multiple phases, incorporating the transparent tonal colors of Gil Evans’ large ensemble works, exploring folkloric flamenco rhythms, applying orchestral concepts to the big-band palette and embracing the wide-ranging pastoral beauty of Americana.
Schneider’s recent creative output has taken a more divergent approach—one that’s rooted in her ongoing struggles to deal with the dichotomies of modern living. As she finds herself ping-ponging between the polar extremes of today’s device-obsessed “digital world” and the simpler “natural world” she grew up with in rural Minnesota, she has fought to reclaim a sense of personal space where she can hear herself think and still connect with people in meaningful ways. She misses the deepness of times past.
Schneider also has emerged as an outspoken musicians’ advocate by calling out corporations such Google and YouTube—and other entities she refers to as “data lords”—for policies that she feels have been unfair to composers and creators of various kinds.
When DownBeat checked in with Schneider on the occasion of her Grammy-winning recording The Thompson Fields (ArtistShare) topping the Jazz Album category of the 2016 Readers Poll, she had recently completed a piece commissioned by the Library of Congress Da Capo Fund titled “Data Lords.” Now, a studio recording of that composition and a series of more recent conceptual pieces that grew out of her frustration with big data have been released as Data Lords, an elaborately packaged double album that explores the conflicting relationships between the digital and natural worlds.
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
“The first recording I owned with Brazilian music on it was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer,” says Renee Rosnes. “And then I just started to go down the rabbit hole.”
Jan 16, 2025 2:02 PM
In her four-decade career, Renee Rosnes has been recognized as a singular voice, both as a jazz composer and a…
“If you don’t keep learning, your mind slows down,” Coleman says. “Use it or lose it.”
Jan 28, 2025 11:38 AM
PolyTropos/Of Many Turns — the title for Steve Coleman’s latest recording on Pi and his 33rd album overall —…
