Maria Schneider said: “It’s kind of nightmarish, what’s happening,” during her performance with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble at the Barbican last night.
She was introducing the title piece from her most recent Grammy-winning double-album. And since 2019, when she wrote and recorded Data Lords, the nightmares have got a whole lot darker.
Half of the album is about the threat to humanity from the people who are scraping and exploiting our data, whether relating to consumer patterns or creative imaginations.
In the past six years we’ve all grown more aware of the activities of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos. More aware, yes, but seemingly powerless (or unwilling) to halt the tightening of their grip.
The contrasting theme of the other half is the importance of the natural world and its phenomena, from birdsong to handmade objects to poetry. Again, it’s necessary only to read the news to appreciate the individually varying but generally increasing levels of threat.
She mixed up the pieces last night, starting with the powerful lyricism of “Bluebird”, its tone set by the accordion of Kalle Moberg. More sardonic and disquieting was “Don’t Be Evil”, which takes its title from Google’s extraordinary instruction to staff.
As waves of brass were finessed down to a chamber trio, this was a demonstration of Schneider’s love of dynamic contrast.
Although she spent several early years as Gil Evans’s protégée, Schneider truly belongs to the genre of composer-arrangers who worked for Stan Kenton in the 1950s: people such as Pete Rugolo, Gene Roland and Bob Graettinger, creators of dramatic charts with plenty of space for fine, characterful soloists.
In Schneider’s hands, such music doesn’t have the built-in flexibility associated with Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, Basie, Carla Bley, Mike Gibbs or, for that matter, Gil Evans, but its musicality and integrity are impeccable. Maybe Kenny Wheeler’s big-band writing is the closest comparison, but Schneider’s music is imbued with her own personality.
Last night’s selection of pieces was well served not just by the ensemble but by all the soloists, given outstanding support throughout from the supple double bass of Trygve Waldemar Fiske.
It was amusing to note that the two women members of the 18-piece ensemble were playing bass trombone and baritone saxophone: between them, Ingrid Utne and Tina Lægrid Olsen were holding up the earth.
Olsen was memorably featured on “Sputnik”, her softly ruminating baritone charged with evoking the innocent wonder once felt by those old enough to remember going outside to see the first satellites (the forerunners of the Starlink system with which Musk can now, should he so wish, control world wars).
As she brought her spellbinding solo gently back down from its low orbit, the tone poem closed with one of those tapered endings — a sort of whispered catharsis — in which the composer specialises.
“I don’t want to leave you with the annihilation of humanity,” Schneider said, introducing the encore, the sweet waltz of “Braided Together”, which she prefaced by reading Ted Kooser’s short poem “december 29”: a flicker of candlelight offering hope amid the gathering gloom.
