For those familiar with Last Tango in Paris: no, not that Maria Schneider.
Maria Schneider is a composer whose weapon of choice is the 18-piece big band. The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra has released nine studio albums which have been awarded a total of seven Grammy Awards plus an additional seven nominations. Fiercely protective of her own music and a champion for intellectual property rights, Schneider has not allowed any of her recordings to be made available for streaming on any platform. Fortunately for us, she recently collaborated with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, performing her latest album Data Lords as a suite, and that performance is available in its entirety on YouTube:
Nearly every composer or arranger for big band has drawn from a handful of easily recognizable influences: Blues, Swing, Latin, Rock, etc. Maria Schneider writes music which just doesn’t sound like anything else, and yet it’s undeniable that everything she does simply works. It definitely still qualifies as Jazz, since she’s able to recruit top jazz musicians to work with her, and she gives them ample space for improvised solos to express their individual selves. Watch the video above and you’ll notice that she supplemented the typical big band with the Argentine folk instrument bandoneon. Who the hell thinks of that?
I was introduced to her music back in college, when the jazz band director had us play some of her charts. It led to one of the all-time great Band on Tour Moments: we were performing at a low-security prison. The director started introducing the Maria Schneider chart we were about to play, and went into a lengthy explanation of how her compositions were truly original and didn’t sound like anything they’d have heard a big band play before. Finally, the gentleman sitting front row center got impatient and spoke up and said, “Just play the song, man, we ain’t goin’ nowhere!”