Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

RADIO October 20, 2020

Big Band Suites - Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, Rufus Reid, Darcy James Argue, Brian Krock

Duke Ellington envisioned long-form jazz compositions before the technology was created to support them. After being limited to around six minutes on two sides of a 78 RPM disc, the advent of the 12' Long-Playing record liberated Ellington and other jazz composers to conceive and record extended compositions. Several contemporary composers are continuing to explore the format with enthusiasm. Recent suites from Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, Rufus Reid, Darcy James Argue and Brian Krock in this hour of Jazz at ...

ALBUM REVIEW September 12, 2020

Maria Schneider: Data Lords

By Friedrich Kunzmann

Well someone doesn't seem too happy with the digital world. But that's nothing new for Maria Schneider. The Grammy-award winning composer and bandleader has been an outspoken critic of copyright abuses in the digital and streaming world of music for the biggest part of the last decade. On her newest effort, she sets her justified quarrels with the industry to music by juxtaposing the cold world of ones and zeroes, comprised on the first CD titled “The Digital World," in ...

RADIO August 24, 2020

Close Your Eyes: Celebrating Bernice Petkere

By Mary Foster Conklin

Included are new releases from the Maria Schneider Orchestra, pianist Nicole Zuraitis, vocal artist Jay Clayton and DuoTrio led by trumpeter Daniel Nissenbaum, with birthday shoutouts to Bernice Petkere (Close Your Eyes, Lullaby of the Leaves), George Shearing, Bill Evans, Cyrille Aimee, Pat Metheny, Lorraine Desmarais, Mary Stallings, Fostina Dixon and more. Thanks for listening and please support the artists you hear by purchasing their music during this time of lockdown. Playlist La Lucha “Lullaby of the Leaves/Lullaby ...

INTERVIEW August 20, 2020

Maria Schneider: On Worlds Diverged

By Dan Bilawsky

We stand today at an intersection between two realities. On one side there's digital darkness--an underbelly of networked netherworlds, profiteers building fortunes on the collective back of musicians, sinister forces posing as corporate protagonists--and on the other, pure light given over through nature's gifts, a kindness and humanity that grace daily existence, and the beauty and interconnectivity of art in its many forms. The act of recognizing how these macrocosms stand as foe vs. friend has been obscured by the ...

ALBUM REVIEW August 11, 2020

Maria Schneider Orchestra: Data Lords

By Jerome Wilson

Composer Maria Schneider has long been writing and speaking about the dangers of the omnipresent digital universe, intellectual property theft, gathering and manipulation of personal data by big tech companies, the unchecked proliferation of false and misleading material, and so on. Those concerns form the basis of her latest musical project, Data Lords, a 2 CD set examining the conflicting realities of the digital and real worlds. The two CDs are labeled “The Digital World" and “Our Natural ...

ALBUM REVIEW August 9, 2020

Maria Schneider: Data Lords

By Doug Hall

Maria Schneider, jazz pianist, orchestral composer and 2019 NEA Jazz Master, has just released a new double-album, Data Lords (artistShare, 2020), which creates poignant musical imagery about our data-driven world. Schneider, who has been an active advocate for musicians' rights and copyright, has followed-on this impact, citing “big data" companies as manipulators of music, culture and privacy. This collection of uniquely and emotionally rendered original compositions addresses the conflicting relationships between the digital and natural worlds, featuring Schneider's orchestra of ...

ALBUM REVIEW August 4, 2020

Maria Schneider Orchestra: Data Lords

By Karl Ackermann

The skillfully designed cover art tells part of the story; a leaf--half as nature intended--the remainder, a circuit board doppelganger. The pastoral soundscapes associated with the music of Grammy-winning composer/bandleader Maria Schneider belie her activist alter-ego. An outspoken critic of copyright protections, prejudicial revenue schemes and the abuses of “big data," Schneider has authored op-eds and testified before the US Congress. She ventures onto unfamiliar terrain, coalescing her passions on a masterwork double album, Data Lords. The two ...