As readers of this space know, I'm a huge admirer of Maria Schneider's music, but her latest, The Thompson Fields (on the ArtistShare label), breaks through to a new level. It's her most ambitious recording, and her most accomplished; it places her in the pantheon of big-band composer-leaders, just below Ellington, Strayhorn, and Gil Evans at his very best; it's a masterpiece.
Schneider started out as Evans' assistant, as well as a student of Bob Brookmeyer's, and, especially in her first decade as a bandleader, their influences—those lush, stacked harmonies—were clear. Over time, her rhythms energized; her harmonies grew more complex; her melody lines took on more muscle, while retaining their airy lyricism. And her band! Her band got better with each season: so tight, so supple, and, seven or eight years ago, something clicked, the horn players turned into superb soloists, as well as top-notch ensemble musicians, and Schneider started writing pieces that built in more space for solos and brushed light strokes of color around them. (It's worth noting that seven of these 17 musicians have played in the band since Schneider started it 22 years ago.)
Her last two big-band records before this one, Concert in the Garden (2004) and Sky Blue (2007), saw Schneider exploring a Latin lilt and adding new instrumental flavors: an accordion, whimsical percussion, sometimes voices. In Winter Morning Walks (2013), which won three Grammys in the classical category, she set poetry to music—arranged for chamber orchestra—with Dawn Upshaw singing the libretto.
The Thompson Fields is a culmination of these two decades of evolution, rich and dense with harmonies, mixed moods, and shifting rhythms—denser, in some ways darker than usual—but always accessible, never losing the flow or the thread, and emotionally moving, sometimes spine-tingling, without lapsing into sentimentality.
It also marks a return to the Americana that streaked through her earlier work; much of this music was inspired by the fields and farmlands that she wandered, growing up in rural Minnesota (the title refers to fields owned by her neighbors, the Thompsons). But then, for the final track, she throws in a wild card, called "Lembranca," a spicy, syncopated remembrance of a samba-soaked night in Rio.
Her liner notes—interspersed in a lavish, 55-page hardbound book of text, photos, drawings, and credits that comes with the disc—muse on the nature of beauty, the wonders of nature, the mystery of the universe; and, amazingly, the music captures all of that, it lives up to its grand ambitions.
Ever since she moved to the artist-owned label ArtistShare, Schneider has lavished enormous care on production and post-production, and this new album is no exception. It was recorded at Avatar Studios, over a five-day period, by Brian Montgomery; mixed for many days more by Montgomery, Schneider, and co-producer Ryan Truesdell; then mastered by Gene Paul. During the sessions, Montgomery set up plenty of vintage mics: RCAs, Coles ribbons, Neumann U47s and U67s, as well as—on the piano and on solo reeds—a custom-modified Chinese microphone that he says sounds a lot like a U67. It's hardly an artifact of "purism": he recorded to 48 channels on HD ProTools at 24/88.2. But Montgomery—who had a hand on Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat, Herbie Hancock's The River, and served as assistant engineer on Schneider's Concert in the Garden—has nailed down the art of making digital manipulation seem reasonably real. The soundstage might not quite exude the side-to-side front-to-back luminosity of Concert in the Garden (engineered by David Baker, who died soon after) or Sky Blue (by Joe Ferla, who has since retired), but those are very high bars. By any other standard, this is a gorgeous album: spacious, detailed, dynamic, and warm.
The Maria Schneider Orchestra is playing at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, through June 6. I saw the early set on Tuesday, opening night, and—like every other time I've seen this band recent years, but more so—it was wondrous.
