Maria Schneider Orchestra: American Crow

Maria Schneider has a thing for birds. Credible sources have reported sightings of the jazz composer frequenting Central Park wearing a floppy hat, a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck. Her 20-plus minute "Cerulean Skies," from her album (one of her masterpieces) Sky Blue (ArtistShare, 2007) speaks to her love for birds; her fascination with their migratory nature and their arduous flights, which span continents and beyond. The composition "Bluebird," from the "Our Natural World"' half of her 2-disc Data Lords (Artishare, 2015) celebrates one of nature's most beautiful avians.

Scheider usually goes big, with a big orchestra, with big ideas. On the previously mentioned Data Lords and Sky Blue—and also her terrific breakout statement, Concert In the Garden (2004), in addition to the expansive Thompson Fields (2015), all of these offered on her Artistshare label—Schneider crafted sweeping statements. All are beautiful works of American art. One reviewer stated that she is our Duke Ellington. Still, it might be more accurate to call her our Gil Evans (a mentor of hers), the arranger who collaborated with Miles Davis on Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess, two luminescent orchestral gems from Columbia Records, released in 1960 and 1959, respectively. And there are also ties, intentional or unintentional, to Aaron Copland, the quintessentially American composer.

American Crow is a relative snippet of Schneider's evolving vision. Some of the anger and angst of this EP album is a bleedover from the tune "The Digital World," from disc 1 of Data Lords. It is a musical commentary on America, circa 2026—the era of politics and a fractured political discourse gone to hell. But behind this, Schneider seems to say, there is still great beauty to behold, juxtaposed with the ominous and the melancholy. For Schneider, beauty is always in the mix, dyed into its wool.

Crows may not be the most beautiful and compelling of birds; they are contentious and raucous, seemingly ill-tempered, bellicose in a most in-your-face way. They steal, they thrust their chest forward and make animals much larger than themselves cower and back down with their brazen taunts and braggadocio. Schneider knows something of crows, having grown up on a farm in rural western Minnesota—prairie land. She hears something in the way the crow rolls in its workings with the world which relates to 21st-century politics, an age of deceitful leaders and bellicose proclamations that do not relate to the truth.

American Crow is Schneider's musical take on the state of the political world. The 10-minute title tune speaks to hope and, at the same time, outrage. The discordances and occasional dissonances allude to wrong, even jarringly-evil roads the country chooses to travel down. There are expansive fanfares and intricate, dark, complex, and inspired solos. And always the orchestra brings the sound back to hope, back to the symmetry of beauty.

American Crow is comprised of two takes of the title tune, plus "A World Lost," a revisitation of the opening track of Data Lords followed by a minute of field recordings of crow vocalizations. 30 minutes of sound. It is Schneider fronting 20-plus musicians in a collaboration as important, meaningful and gorgeous as anything she has created.