I remember heading down to the Visiones club in the heart of Greenwich Village back in the late 80's and early 90's to hear Schneider conduct her band comprised of some of the best NY musicians. It was like a lab and she was able at that time during the heart of of the Republican war on art play mostly each every week. It was a treat. Today Schneider continues composing lovely sumptuous stuff like Thompson Fields but it seems unjust that a collective like the one that she led and conducted can exist in our real world today.
The jazz orchestra is a notoriously expensive beast, which is why relatively few jazz composers choose to work with it. Composer and band leader Maria Schneider is one of those few. Over several decades she’s defied economic logic to work exclusively within the medium, refining her art as composer and arranger to the point where she now has few if any peers.
Her latest album, some 10 years in the making, shows just what a supple and powerful instrument a jazz orchestra can be. The title refers to a farm owned by some family friends in the South-West corner of Minnesota, near where Schneider was raised herself. It’s unspectacular country, apart from those occasions when a storm boils up on the horizon, but Schneider loves it deeply. The eight numbers on the album, all composed by Schneider, evoke its quiet, unspectacular beauty. The liner notes are an indispensable part of the experience, picturing the landscape and its wildlife through Audobon’s bird paintings and photographs of country lanes that to a British viewer look remarkably familiar – until you turn the page and encounter another image, which shows this landscape is on an altogether vaster scale.
The music echoes that quality of being both huge and intimate. Often a number will begin with a musing, gentle solo, such as the plaintive accordion melody played by Gary Versace that begins Home. At first this is heard against high tinkling piano, beautifully played by Frank Kimbrough (like all great band-leaders, Schneider attracts the best players because she gives them space to breathe). This is soon subsumed by a chorale in brass and saxes, and the music swells to a broad tutti glow. But as with every piece, what seems to be a straightforward emotional trajectory from small to large is complicated by switchbacks and surprises. Nimbus, a hymn to the drama of Minnesota’s great storms has a fascinating indefinable emotional flavour, fateful in the way mysterious calms keep falling across the music, only to be pushed aside by another big climax
The title track adds a touch of twilight mystery, with bell-like piano harmonies straight out of Messiaen strung like garlands over simple major chords below. Not everything is musing and gentle. Arbiters of Evolutions is a big bold number, striding over the flat green fields of Minnesota in seven-league boots, the saxes of Donny McCaslin and Scott Robinson calling out like birds.
There’s a grand naturalist compulsion in Maria Schneider’s writing for large ensemble, and it has led her toward a more potent expression of her art. “The Thompson Fields,” the first album since 2007 to feature her namesake orchestra, teems with observant references to the pastoral world: prairies, exotic bird plumage, the dark gyre of a funnel cloud, the flutter of monarch butterflies.
Ms. Schneider, a composer and orchestrator of extravagant insight, has made these kinds of connections for a while. And as a conceptual device, it’s not a new story in jazz: Duke Ellington set a precedent for capturing the rhythms of life that Wynton Marsalis has diligently adapted to his own uses. But Ms. Schneider has her own trademark way of using timbre and harmony to bring a tactile presence to the dimensions of sound — and more impressively, of applying the same tools to illuminate emotional terrain.
Because she works at her own pace, she has had time to break in most of the album’s pieces, including the title track, a sweeping rumination featuring Lage Lund on guitar and Frank Kimbrough on piano, composed more than five years ago. “Walking by Flashlight,” the album’s overture, adapts a theme from her 2013 album “Winter Morning Walks” (ArtistShare), for chamber orchestra and soprano, which won three Grammy Awards in the classical field.
The orchestra, as a single breathing organism, is Ms. Schneider’s instrument, but she also puts a great deal of responsibility on her soloists.
So a track called “Arbiters of Evolution” becomes a swaggering concerto for the tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin, the ensemble surging and receding behind him. Something similar happens with the alto saxophonist Steve Wilson on “Nimbus,” an evocation of heavy weather; and with Gary Versace, playing accordion on “A Potter’s Song,” dedicated to the memory of the trumpeter Laurie Frink, a longtime fixture of the band.
The album’s deluxe packaging, with its handsome photographs, illustrations and text, amplifies its brilliant musical ambitions and serves as a statement of principle for Ms. Schneider, a vocal critic of music streaming services. Compensation is her main argument, but the physical experience of music also seems like a factor — speaking of which, her orchestra will perform in the flesh at Birdland, from Tuesday through Saturday.
Ted Kooser’s poem “November 18” inspired the piece Schneider calls “Walking By Flashlight.” The quiet dynamics of her orchestration support a solo by Scott Robinson on alto clarinet, an instrument seldom used in modern music. Robinson employs it with the intimacy the piece demands. Schneider’s longtime pianist Frank Kimbrough solos in the same mood. Kimbrough later shines with guitarist Lage Lund on the album’s title piece inspired by a farm near Windom owned by Schneider’s family friends the Thompsons. “The Monarch and the Milkweed” features trombonist Marshall Gilkes and flugelhornist Greg Gisbert. Subtle brush strokes painted into the soundscape by drummer Clarence Penn contrast with the intensity of Schneider’s orchestration. Superb engineering, mixing and post-production mastering enhance such nuances.
“Arbiters of Evolution,” the New Guinea excursion, reflects on the competitive displays of male birds-of-paradise. A big piece of orchestral impressionism packed with energy, it features long virtuosic solos by tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and Robinson on baritone sax. The two then improvise exchanges suggesting the dazzling exhibitions that male birds perform as they compete for the attention of a female deciding on a mate. Schneider’s album notes describe how she was moved by film of those touching and funny avian performances. Her score and the band’s energy capture both aspects.
“Nimbus” recalls tension, fear and weird beauty in a part of the Midwest subject to storms that bring the sudden violence of tornadoes—and the relief when one passes without leaving a trail of destruction. “A Potter’s Song” memorializes Laurie Frink (1951-2013), who was the Schneider orchestra’s lead trumpeter. Gary Versace is the soloist in the elegy, playing with taste unlikely to generate new accordion jokes. In other pieces, Schneider employs simple accordion lines by Versace as commentary or as artful contrast with the ensemble. One such instance is the introduction to “Home,” a thread of single notes from the accordion. The featured soloist, tenor saxophonist Rich Perry, enters with his pure tone, wafting on hymn-like orchestral chords as he and the rhythm section gather intensity. Schneider’s voicings of the orchestra’s bottom notes in this piece are a highlight of the album.
“Lembranca” is Schneider’s remembrance of the influential Brazilian musician Paulo Moura (1932-2010) and her visit with him to a Rio de Janeiro samba school where he was a hero. Trombonist Ryan Keberle and bassist Jay Anderson have lengthy solos; Keberle’s expansive, Anderson’s compelling in spite of—or perhaps because of—his soft tone. Kimbrough and Versace play important roles in setting the temper of the piece. Penn’s drumming and the work of guest percussionist Rogerio Boccato impart the samba spirit. Schneider’s orchestration uses dynamics to build excitement, and then lets it subside slowly for a satisfying end to the piece and the album.
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