Maria Schneider (center) whose album
Data Lords was one of 2020's most acclaimed jazz albums, performs with her orchestra at the New York City club Jazz Standard, where the group had an 16-year annual Thanksgiving week performance that was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gulnara Khamatova
/ Courtesy of the artist
Originally published on January 15, 2021 11:29 am
I can think of no better summation of our shared experience over the last year than "A World Lost," the title of the piece that opens Maria Schneider's
Data Lords. A slow, foreboding dirge in an oblong time signature, it instantly sets a tone of somber contemplation. Revisiting it now, as an overture to the most critically acclaimed jazz album of 2020, I hear a chronicle of pained nostalgia — mindful of the unbearable losses of life and livelihood, and the more slippery deprivations of place and custom, that marked the past year. I also think of all the old rituals that knitted a constituency into a scene, and how many of those were taken for granted.