Maria Schneider Orchestra to Present DATA LORDS at BroadStage in March

2019 NEA Jazz master and seven-time GRAMMY winner Maria Schneider will bring her expansive talent to BroadStage, with arrangements from her 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist album Data Lords, on Friday, March 3 at 7:30 pm at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage. With her 18-piece orchestra, Schneider boldly explores the polar extremes of the digital and organic world. Tickets starting at $50 are available at broadstage.org or by calling 310.434.3200.

Blurring the lines between genres, her varied commissioners stretch from Jazz at Lincoln Center, to The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, to the American Dance Festival, and include collaboration with David Bowie. She is among a small few to receive GRAMMYS in multiple genres, having received the award in jazz and classical, as well as for her work with David Bowie.

Her latest double-album, Data Lords (2020), winner of two GRAMMY Awards, was named Jazz Album of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and NPR, and winner of France's prestigious Grand Prix de l'Académie du Jazz, has melded her advocacy and art.

The Pulitzers described Data Lords as "an enveloping musical landscape of light and shadow, rendered by the many personalities of a large jazz ensemble, reflecting the promise of a digital paradise contrasted by a concentration of power and the loss of privacy."

With her first recording, Evanescence (1994), Schneider began developing her personal way of writing for her 18-member collective made up of many of the finest musicians in jazz today, tailoring her compositions to the uniquely creative voices of the group. They have performed at festivals and concert halls worldwide, and she herself has received numerous commissions and guest-conducting invites, working with over 90 groups in over 30 countries.

Unique funding of projects has become a hallmark for Schneider through the trend-setting company, ArtistShare. And, in 2004, Concert in the Garden became historic as the first recording to win a GRAMMY with Internet-only sales. Even more significantly, it blazed the "crowd-funding" trail as ArtistShare's first release, and was eventually inducted into the 2019 National Recording Registry.

Schneider's many honors also include: 14 GRAMMY-nominations, 7 GRAMMY Awards, numerous Jazz Journalists Association awards, DOWNBEAT and JAZZTIMES Critics and Readers Polls awards, an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, ASCAP's esteemed Concert Music Award (2014), the nation's highest honor in jazz, "NEA Jazz Master" (2019) and election into the 2020 American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A strong voice for music advocacy, Schneider has testified before the US Congressional Subcommittee on Intellectual Property on digital rights, has given commentary on CNN, participated in round-tables for the United States Copyright Office, has been quoted in numerous publications for her views on Spotify, YouTube, Google, digital rights, and music piracy, and has written various white papers and articles on the digital economy as related to music and beyond.

"Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine," she said to Sebastian Scotney at The Arts Desk. "We were the first to be used and traded for data." This is a very deeply held and life-long conviction for Schneider. Her father was an inventor employed by the Kimberly-Clark corporation, so the company owned every single one of his inventions. "So I was very aware" she has said, "of what it meant for a man to create something and have pride in his inventions. I grew up with that."

More about Data Lords

David Hajdu for THE NATION writes, "Data Lords is a work of holistic creativity. The music of outrage and critique in the first album has all the emotion and conceptual integrity that the music of melancholy and reverence does in the second. I can't conceive of anyone else creating this music, unless Delius has been writing with Bowie on the other side."

"The message, the rancor, the sense of injustice are deeply embedded in every moment of the first album. And yet Schneider's craft and judgment are such that music in the eerie, dystopian world has the marvelous feeling for structure, pacing and often sheer beauty that listeners who know Schneider's music will be expecting."

"The second disc Our Natural World is a complete contrast. It is epic, glorious. And devotees of Schneider's work can go straight to tracks like 'Braided Together' and 'Bluebird' where they recognize all of the poise, poetry and divine sense of pacing that they know well."

Schneider said to Jon Briem in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Every time you go online, every company, every ad is trying to get you to spend time on their site to get information from you, to get data from you, to get you to buy something. The music is expressing that, and my frustration with that. But I tried to make it beautiful and expressive - and a little bit fun. I found myself reconnecting with all the things that are most important to me - birds, people, space and silence. So I ended up with things from two polarized worlds but that in itself was telling me something about this world we all live in."

"Data Lords is her magnum opus, a riveting, remarkably intense double album, as profound as modern-day instrumental music gets ... the first disc finds Schneider exploring new sounds that were ignited by her collaboration with David Bowie as the arranger of his 2015 track, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)," for which she won a Grammy for best arrangement for instrumental and vocals. "He really encouraged me to just take risks with music," Schneider recalled. "He said, 'If the plane goes down, we all walk away. So just go for it.' I think I kind of let it all hang out."

Regarding Data Lords, Nate Chinen of NPR writes: "... a magnificent double album, Data Lords parses into thematic halves, 'The Digital World' and, as an antidote, 'The Natural World.' On the whole and in the details, it amounts to the most daring work of Schneider's career, which sets the bar imposingly high. This is music of extravagant mastery, and it comes imbued with a spirit of risk. 'I've never had more fun writing music,' she said. 'I threw caution to the wind on this album, and it felt really good.'

"As it turns out, Bowie's work wasn't done. After his death in early 2016 - Schneider held on to a shard of his advice. During the development of "Sue," she'd been fretting over how to make the piece work, and whether it could. At one point, sensing her panic, Bowie laughed. "The great thing about music," he said, "is if the plane goes down, we all walk away."

"Short of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which famously lived on the road, or the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which has the backing of a major organization, few big bands have ever been able to establish this nearly metabolic sensitivity as a collective."

"Sometimes for me, the whole process of music feels more like a Ouija board than it does a conscious thing," Schneider reflects. "I think one of the really mystical things about music is how you can go into that place inside of yourself, when you're writing or making something - that space that I was talking about that I fear we're losing," Schneider says. "And I believe that when you make that encounter - with the most concentration, and the best craftsmanship, and everything else that you put together in your life to try to bring that into form as clearly as you can - then it captures something ineffable but that people feel. And it's very real."

Photo Credit: Dina Regine

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