A lot of people first encountered Maria Schneider’s music via her short but very memorable collaboration with late-career David Bowie, but this composer and conductor has for about thirty years led a jazz orchestra that has long been widely considered the gold standard of the current age. Personally, I think “Sue (Or In A Season of Crime)” was the best piece of music Bowie had recorded in his ‘final act’ stage, but that recording only provides a hint of the tremendous acuity Schneider brings in full doses on her own records.
Even a globally-renowned, multiple Grammy-winning orchestra such as Schneider’s is difficult to fund in the 21st century, and she has to rely on commissions and the crowdsourcing website ArtistShare to bring her projects to the public. Data Lords is Schneider’s fifth album in a row she’s made using ArtistShare and her first since 2015’s autobiographical The Thompson Fields, an album that racked up a bunch of 5-star reviews.
Schneider had a different theme in mind for her next album, one that expresses society’s loss of control and identity due to the massive, aggressive and stealthy collection of personal data from tech giants such as Google and Facebook, and how much harder it is to retreat to the natural world, that part of our being still unaffected by the ugly side effects of technology.
Schneider has a story to tell and she tells it through her detailed scoring. The first disc, ‘The Digital World,’ is about what Schneider calls “the dark manifestations of the internet.” An orchestra can be the perfect vehicle for channeling such a dystopia and Schneider knows just how to do it.
The impact of “A World Lost” creeps up on you, just as the takeover of our personal data gradually and without warning has overwhelmed us. Ben Monder’s electric guitar — as it does for this whole side — is there to remind us of the evil you can’t see but can definitely feel, and that feeling is borne out by Rich Perry’s tenor sax. Structurally, this song is a pair of repeating figures, but Schneider puts in a lot of work into the varying intensity by which those figures are twisted out.
Monder’s dark fuzztones rear up on the ironic Google motto “Don’t Be Evil,” and Ryan Keberle’s trombone might not seem the best choice on paper for a bleak vibe like this, but he proves Schneider’s instincts are correct.
The phrase “CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?” comes from ham radio, which Schneider astutely points out brought a nirvana of connecting with strangers from far away that today’s social media never fully delivered despite the promise. Three tracks in and she’s made it sound as if we’re still falling further into the abyss, not the least culprit is Greg Gisbert’s electronically-altered trumpet.
“Sputnik” is really about satellites in general, today’s satellites which are, among other things, used as surveillance tools, often nefariously. The majesty of space is conveyed here, as is the misgivings triggered by the space race conveyed by Scott Robinson’s aching baritone sax.
Mike Rodriguez’s trumpet on “Data Lords” soars and Dave Pietro’s sorrowful alto sax leads the big band down to the low mood again. The rest of the group might be in a somewhat dirge state but drummer Johnathan Blake is having none of that, and he keeps up the stamina until everyone else gathers enough steam to keep up with him. The song ends with a whimper, perhaps signifying Stephen Hawking’s prediction that artificial intelligence will eventually spell the end of mankind.
But all is not lost…
‘Our Natural World’ is the name for the second disc, dedicated to that natural, “inner” world inside ourselves, and accordingly, the music portrays a decidedly more upbeat tint. It’s only fitting that ‘Our Natural World’ begins in “Sanzenin” with a feature by Gary Versace’s Old World accordion, yet he plays it so progressively over the lush horns playing an imposing circular pattern. We hear Versace all throughout this chapter; while Monder’s guitar was the angel of darkness on ‘The Digital World,’ Versace’s squeezebox serves as an angel of mercy all over ‘Our Natural World.’
“Stone Song” is the most intimate song in this grouping, where Steve Wilson on soprano sax jousts playfully with Frank Kimbrough (piano), Versace, Jay Anderson (bass) and a touch of Blake. The rest of the orchestra doesn’t get off the sidelines until well into the song and even then, they stay light-footed.
“Look Up” is a deception of sorts; a song of descending chords but also uplifting; Marshall Gilkes’ trombone sees to that. “Braided Together,” inspired by a poem from Ted Kooser, sees the return of Pietro as the featured soloist, and the melody without prose is nonetheless very poetic in how Schneider has the song waltz with poignancy by deftly modulating the pulse. Avid birdwatcher Schneider named the next tune “Bluebird,” which includes some lovely, overlapping layers of horn sections and also has Wilson returning to the fore to deliver an increasingly funky and agitated performance.
Schneider chose to end the program with “The Sun Waited For Me,” an assurance that despite all our earthly worries, the simple pleasures unconnected to the wired world are still there, waiting for us to take enjoyment in them. Donny McCaslin rises to the occasion, taking his tenor saxophone to ever higher levels of fulfillment.
There’s a message in all music; how successful is the music depends a lot on how effective it is in carrying out its message. Maria Schneider wanted to send a strong message about the threat of a mass manipulation of humanity with Data Lords. Through her high standard for meticulous composing and arranging, delivered by some of jazz’s best musicians, she gets the message across in perhaps the grandest way possible.
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