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,