Maria Schneider Orchestra: Sky Blue

The warmest of accolades have already been heaped upon Maria Schneider's new record, and deservedly so. How, everyone seems to wonder, could Schneider possibly top the Grammy-winning Concert in the Garden (ArtistShare, 2004)? Forget that. How could she possibly top the first four minutes of "The Pretty Road," the track that opens Sky Blue? Somehow, Ingrid Jensen's long and suitably airy solo lifts the piece higher still. And then there are four more incredible numbers...

Beyond the oft-remarked lineage that links Schneider to Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, the central role played by birds on the majority of the pieces featured here might call to mind Olivier Messiaen, arguably the greatest composer of the 20th century, and certainly one of the weirdest. Messiaen, drunk on Catholic mysticism, pursued the intricacies of birdsong to glimpse the Divine. Schneider's approach is, by all appearances, more agnostic, but similarly focused on the natural world, something outside human history.

Meanwhile, "Rich's Piece," built around the phenomenal playing of saxophonist Rich Perry, is nevertheless as spiritual sounding as those of mid-period John Coltrane, or subsequently Pharaoh Sanders. While the birdsong at the beginning of the magisterial "Cerulean Sky" recalls the opening of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" more than a Messiaen composition, Frank Kimbrough's jagged piano playing at various turns sounds more than a little like Messiaen's birdsong experiments.

But if birdsong lifts the attention not just skyward, but heavenward, other aspects of the avian analogy return the gaze to worldly concerns. Migration—the global mobility of birds that is a theme of "Sky Blue," the final composition here—is a metaphor for human migration, a social phenomenon at the root of so many musical innovations, including jazz itself. The echoes of Aaron Copland on the big, open chords of "Rich's Piece" and "Cerulean Sky," and the profound mastery of the jazz idiom on this record—these are sonic markers of community, of shared experience. Many of the human experiences explicitly evoked are more personal than social—memory, loss, dance, the rebirth of hope—but they are as human as the birdsong connections are celestial.

Sky Blue is that rare record that plumbs the sacred and the profane; life-affirming music.