When Maria Schneider led her long-running jazz orchestra in a 2015 London performance of that year’s release The Thompson Fields, the great American composer and bandleader confirmed that her scenically spacious, luminously harmonised Gil Evans-inflected music – conjuring up landscapes, birdsong, and a kind of tranquil innocence – was in its exultant prime. But with Data Lords – her new double LP on the crowd-funded ArtistShare label – a steeliness and even bleakness now shares a stage with her familiar pastoral side. A tireless advocate of musicians’ ownership of their work who has taken copyright issues all the way to Congress, Schneider has brought her battle with the corporations and big-tech’s asset-stripping of personal and private spaces into this darker repertoire. (The album is only available for physical or digital purchasing, not streaming.) She also credits work with David Bowie on his song Sue (Or In a Season of Crime) – for which she won one of her five Grammys – for tapping her darker midlife energies.
That spirit courses through the baleful A World Lost, with its ghostly, lamenting slides from Ben Monder’s guitar, and Rich Perry’s Coltraneish tenor sax over growling low brass. The strutting Don’t Be Evil throbs with the sinewy motivic criss-crossings of a bleakly busy world, Bowie saxophonist Donny McCaslin wheels out of voicelike wails from the band on CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?, and the title track, a standout, builds to a storm-tossed collective whirl. The album’s second side is more traditionally Schneidersque in the hopping, birdlike Stone Song, with its delicately whistling Gary Versace accordion sound, the sumptuous layering of Look Up, and the glowing, churchy solemnity of The Sun Waited for Me. The inner tensions behind this compelling session promise a revealing new phase in Schneider’s remarkable work.
Also out this month
The conversational creativity of American sax star Joshua Redman’s 1994 quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade is all the sharper for the intervening years on their reunion album RoundAgain (Nonesuch), a set buzzing with Redman’s long-lined fluency, Mehldau’s astute lyricism, and McBride’s and Blade’s urgent energy. UK singer Zara McFarlane brings her translucent sound and jazz-honed resourcefulness ever closer to her Caribbean roots on Songs of an Unknown Tongue (Brownswood). Trading a jazz lineup for electronic beats and percussion, she evokes Jamaican traditions and ritual, continuing her captivating fascination with what and where home is. And Norway’s still uncategorisable 25-year-old ensemble Jaga Jazzist release their ninth album, Pyramid (Brainfeeder) – hypnotically melodic, psychedically orchestral and infallibly edgy contemporary music.
