Jazz Articles about Maria Schneider

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Maria Schneider Orchestra: Days of Wine and Roses: Live at the Jazz Standard

by Brian P. Lonergan
December 25, 2005

Big band leader Maria Schneider employs a simple formula on Live at the Jazz Standard: beautiful, multi-hued, and layered arrangements plus first-rate instrumentalists equals a vibrant modern big band session. This is not to say that the music is simple; anything but. Rather, the musicians' fluidity makes the set come across as effortless, while Schneider's approach strikes a fine balance between the big band imperatives of arranging and soloing. In fact, one of the most exciting aspects ...

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Maria Schneider Orchestra: Days of Wine and Roses: Live at the Jazz Standard

by John Kelman
December 13, 2005

When a jazz album is as successful as composer/arranger/conductor Maria Schneider's Concert in the Garden (ArtistShare, 2004), there's a different expectation for the followup. Winning a Grammy and being on many top ten lists can ring the death knell for a pop album, since fans expect the followup to be an even greater event. But with jazz, careers tend to be considered as a larger continuum. Some albums may be more daring than others, but there's not the same level ...

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Maria Schneider: Concert in the Garden

by Sean Patrick Fitzell
October 16, 2004

Lush harmonies evoking a sense of romance and dynamic rhythms alluding to dance abound on composer/arranger Maria Schneider's Concert in the Garden. She assuredly guides her 17-piece band through cinematic compositions that would feel at home in a Golden Age Hollywood epic. Schneider is more interested in exploring the melodic, harmonic and textural possibilities the instrumentation allows than flexing its power. Never shrill, from a whisper to nearly a roar, the ensemble employs dynamic range for dramatic impact, as featured ...

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Maria Schneider Orchestra: Concert in the Garden

by Jerry D'Souza
September 3, 2004

Maria Schneider's first three recordings have been admirable, due not only to her insight as a composer and her skills as an arranger, but also to the musicians that make up her orchestra. It is they who are the architects of her plan, and they get fully involved, giving the final edifice a rich presence and making it a marvelous listening experience that will long linger in the mind.

While the main inspiration is Brazilian music and yes, ...

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Maria Schneider: Concert In The Garden

by AAJ Staff
August 25, 2004

With her new release, the magnificent Concert In The Garden , composer-arranger Maria Schneider has taken very real artistic and commercial risks. She has produced the CD herself, and has authorized a limited release, available only from her website. She has taken complete artistic and financial control of her music, with all the uncertainties inherent therein.

The music is certainly ambitious. The pieces are lengthy, and they flow effortlessly from one to the next, as if the entire album were ...

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Maria Schneider Orchestra: Concert in the Garden

by Dan McClenaghan
July 6, 2004

Composer/arranger Maria Schneider, at the helm of her seventeen-piece orchestra, soars back and forth over the blurry line that separates classical music and jazz on Concert in the Garden , her first CD offering since 2000's Grammy-nominated Allegresse.With Schneider's compositions, movement seems always a theme. From her gravity-defying “Hang Gliding" on Allegresse to her dance-inpired suite, “Three Romances" here, the composer is always pulling the listener into complex, swirling and majestic musical narratives. Dance inspires Schneider, and indeed ...

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The Maria Schneider Orchestra: Allegresse

by Jack Bowers
February 1, 2001

There are no liner notes in the booklet accompanying the latest release by the Maria Schneider Orchestra, but there are five candid close'ups of Schneider conducting, and another photograph on the front cover in which she is seen holding a white rose to her face. So exactly what is being promoted here? Leaving the rhetorical question unanswered, we should say that, as a whole, All'gresse, Schneider's third album for enja, represents her best recorded work to date. There are some ...