Since the release of her debut album Evanessence in 1994, Minnesota-born Maria Schneider has established herself as one of the most remarkable and influential composers in jazz. She possesses her own singular voice with an expansive, open composing style that’s an aural expression of the rural southwest Minnesota prairie where she grew up.
In addition to three decades of work with her New York City orchestra, Schneider has written for classical soprano Dawn Upshaw and collaborated with rock-icon David Bowie on the track “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” She’s a pioneer of crowdsourcing and her albums since 2004 have all been released through ArtistShare, one of the internet’s earliest “fan-funding” platforms. Her album Concert in the Garden was the first crowd-sourced record to win a Grammy Award.
Schneider is also an activist concerned about the threat technology poses to artists and the human spirit. She’s angered by the corporate greed of big data companies and has testified before Congress about copyright law and how musicians are being ripped off by streaming services.
Schneider says her life is caught between the opposing worlds of art and nature and commerce and technology. Her latest album, Data Lords, is a musical exploration of these two polarized extremes. It’s available throughArtistShare as a 2-CD set or a high-res download split into two thematic halves: “The Digital World” and “Our Natural World.”
Schneider says she didn’t set out to produce an album of musical compositions dedicated to the contrasting organic and digital worlds.
“When I write music I just sit down and start fooling around with ideas and looking around for something that inspires me,” Schneider says. “What it was conjuring up were all of these images and thoughts about big data. But then after writing a piece like that I would find myself writing sort of a palette cleanser; something inspired by a piece of pottery by Jack Troy, or the poetry of Ted Kooser or various other things.”
“It kind of ping-ponged back and forth and for a long time I was thinking ‘I don’t know how I’ll ever record any of this music because it’s so diverse,’” she explains. “And then one day I looked at it and said, ‘what is it telling me about my life?’ And then I thought, ‘it’s telling me that I’m struggling between these two worlds myself.’ And so then I decided to consciously write a few pieces to fill out this idea.”
Schneider’s compositions from “Our Natural World” are filled with the sumptuous orchestral colors and uplifting, open melodic passages combined with joyous solos that are a hallmark of so much of her music. On “The Digital World,” she creates a darker and more ominous and brooding soundscape.
As Schneider points out, some of her earlier work also has a dark edge. She credits her 2014 collaboration with David Bowie for bringing out a more ominous tone in some of the music she created for Data Lords.
“He said that he really liked my dark stuff,” Schneider remembers. “And he really wanted me to delve into that in collaborating with him. And I started to rediscover the joy of writing dark music. So, we can blame David Bowie for this one.”
Despite the opposing themes of the two halves of Data Lords, Schneider says writing the music for “The Digital World” was as much of an enjoyable experience as composing the more pastoral pieces for “Our Natural World.”
“Writing dark doesn’t mean you’re brooding and miserable,” Schneider says. “I tried to make it beautiful and fun. The composition “Sputnik” imagines satellites and it feels like outer space. The title track “Data Lords,” even though it’s about artificial intelligence destroying us, is sort of a beautiful approach to that as there can be. And “Don’t Be Evil” is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek and is mocking Google for their motto.”
Throughout her career Schneider has found musical inspiration in her southwest Minnesota childhood. One of “The Digital World” compositions, “CQ, CQ, Is Anybody There?” comes out of her memories of the bleeping sounds of her father’s ham radio. It’s an experimental work that has Schneider using Morse code patterns in the music.
Schneider says every rhythm in this piece spells out words in Morse code like power, greed, power, A.I. or CQ. (CQ is the invitation code used by ham operators in making a call.) She says it was a really difficult piece to write, but, like the others, it was also fun. She found that a lot the words in Morse code had great swinging rhythms.
Schneider says the whole beginning of “CQ, CQ Is Anybody There” is meant to conjure up what she used to hear from her dad’s ham radio. “It was sort of his mysterious world over in the corner of the living room that I never really understood,” she remembers. “There were all of these crazy sounds with voices split into all sorts of harmonics, colors and sounds. I was trying to get that feeling of hearing those Morse code messages coming from all over. It’s a weird piece.”
The opening composition on Data Lords, “A World Lost,” mourns the disappearing community she knew growing up in Windom, Minnesota. It was inspired by a conversation with an old high school classmate who told her that kids now largely keep isolated in their individual electronic worlds. In the album’s liner notes, Schneider writes about staring out of the window as a child, sometimes horribly bored with her mind bouncing uncomfortably. She says those moments weren’t fun, but sitting there long enough, an imaginary world eventually filled the void. She says those empty spaces make us ripe for daydreaming and creativity. Today, in blank or bleak moments, we all instantly grab for the companionship of a device to fill the vacuum with prefabricated entertainment.
Schneider’s music on Data Lords isn’t for casual listening. It needs focused attention to appreciate and understand. But listening closely to music is a skill that’s increasingly rare, which is why Schneider wanted to produce a lavish package for Data Lords with extensive liner notes that would inspire people to sit and dive into the music without outside distractions. “If you’re going to put on Data Lords and drive, chances are you’re going to get a speeding ticket,” she laughs. “Or it’s going to be really unnerving and you certainly can’t play it while you’re having a conversation or dinner.”
It’s not just the constant distractions of digital devices that make it difficult to concentrate on listening to music today. There’s also so much of it everywhere and it is so easily available. It’s different from the pre-internet age when music fans often had just a few albums to play over and over and got to know the music intimately.
“I think when we had less to listen to, we listened so deeply,” Schneider says. “I would sit in front of that record player with the lights out and listen again and again and it would be such a transportive experience. I knew those records so well. And now [with so much to listen to], I don’t know that it helps as a musician. Is it better to listen a few things and just love them? As a person, what’s healthier? I miss those old days and I’ve been thinking a lot lately how to pull my life back and become more like that. And it might mean pulling back from work a lot, because as a human I want my life to be that again. I don’t want this kind of drive thru kind of life I feel like I’m also living right now.”
Data Lords was recorded in the late August and early September 2019 and released in the summer of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the gigs for her band were canceled, which has made it more difficult to sell CDs. The band’s annual Thanksgiving gig at the Jazz Standard didn’t happen and a few weeks later the famous New York City venue closed. However, Schneider believes Covid-19 has made the concept of Data Lords all that more resonant with people.
“This idea that we are dependent on the internet is in some ways giving us beautiful things like connectivity,” Schneider says. “But in another way we’re all ‘Zoomed out’ and a lot of people have really tried to embrace those other things that are more represented on the second CD, ‘Our Natural World.’ I know that when the pandemic started I couldn’t find bird seed at any store. Everybody was feeding the birds. Then I went to the garden store. I wanted to plant some native plants but there was nothing left. Everybody was working on their gardens. I thought, ‘Wow! This is fantastic!’”
Schneider says people have written to her saying the music on Data Lords has really touched them. “I think it’s the right time for the message. It just happened that way.”
Schneider’s Data Lords has received a 2021 Grammy nomination for "Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album." The track “Sputnik” is nominated for “Best Instrumental Composition.” The Grammy Awards ceremony is scheduled for March 14.