Revered composer and orchestra leader Maria Schneider wins
major French Award
Le Grand Prix de l’Académie du Jazz
Best Record of the Year for double album Data Lords
with the Maria Schneider Orchestra available via ArtistShare
Boundary-defying composer and orchestra leader Maria Schneider has won Le Grand Prix de l’Académie du Jazz for her revelatory double album Data Lords. Inspired by conflicting relationships between the digital and natural worlds, Data Lords (July 2020, ArtistShare) features the world-class Maria Schneider Orchestra.
“I am grateful to l’Académie du Jazz for this tremendous honor,” says Schneider. “To receive this award from this excellent organization in France, a country that is awake to the ravages of big tech companies on our lives and our rights, is of special significance to me. I am grateful to my incredible band who truly make the music what it is. I would like to dedicate this award to pianist Frank Kimbrough, who was such an important part of my band for so many years, and whom we lost suddenly this year.”
Data Lords – which was made, funded and documented through ArtistShare, the world’s first crowd-funding internet platform – has earned two Grammy nominations and broad critical acclaim:
“Now it's finally here, in the form of a magnificent double album, Data Lords. . . it parses into thematic halves, ‘The Digital World’ and, as an antidote, ‘The Natural World.’ On the whole and in the details, it amounts to the most daring work of Schneider's career, which sets the bar imposingly high. This is music of extravagant mastery, and it comes imbued with a spirit of risk." – Nate Chinen, NPR
“Beyond the dualism in its format, Data Lords is a work of holistic creativity. The music of outrage and critique in the first album has all the emotion and conceptual integrity that the music of melancholy and reverence does in the second. I can’t conceive of anyone else creating this music, unless Delius has been writing with Bowie on the other side.” – David Hajdu, The Nation
“Data Lords is a major piece of work…. The message, the rancour, the sense of injustice are deeply embedded in every moment of the first album. And yet Schneider’s craft and judgment are such that music in the eerie, dystopian world has the marvellous feeling for structure, pacing and often sheer beauty that listeners who know Schneider’s music will be expecting…. The second disc Our Natural World is a complete contrast. It is epic, glorious.” – Sebastian Scotney, TheArtsDesk.com
“Data Lords is a boldly conceptual immersion in a critical duality of modern life…” – David Fricke, JazzTimes cover story
“The prodigiously gifted composer, arranger, and bandleader Maria Schneider has a whole lot on her mind these days, and much of it has made its way into her impressive new double CD, Data Lords.… she exhibits a masterly control of bold and inventive tonal landscapes and subtler orchestral shadings.” – Steve Futterman, The New Yorker
4-stars. “With Data Lords – a steeliness and even bleakness now shares a stage with her familiar pastoral side. . . . The inner tensions behind this compelling session promise a revealing new phase in Schneider's remarkable work.” – John Fordham, The Guardian
Maria Schneider’s music has been hailed by critics as evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, imaginative, revelatory, riveting, daring, and beyond categorization. Blurring the lines between genres, her varied commissioners stretch from Jazz at Lincoln Center, to The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, to the American Dance Festival, and include collaboration with David Bowie. She is among a small few to receive Grammys in multiple genres, having received the award in jazz and classical, as well as for her work with David Bowie.
With her first recording Evanescence (1994), Schneider began developing her personal way of writing for her 18-member collective made up of many of the finest musicians in jazz today, tailoring her compositions to the uniquely creative voices of the group. They have performed at festivals and concert halls worldwide, and she herself has received numerous commissions and guest-conducting invites, working with over 90 groups in over 30 countries.
Unique funding of projects has become a hallmark for Schneider through the trend-setting company, ArtistShare. And, in 2004, Concert in the Garden became historic as the first recording to win a GRAMMY with Internet-only sales. Even more significantly, it blazed the "crowd-funding" trail as ArtistShare’s first release, and was eventually inducted into the 2019 National Recording Registry.
Schneider’s many honors also include: 14 Grammy nominations, 5 Grammy Awards, numerous Jazz Journalists Association awards, DownBeat and JazzTimes Critics and Readers Poll awards, an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, ASCAP’s esteemed Concert Music Award (2014), the nation's highest honor in jazz, “NEA Jazz Master” (2019) (NEA Jazz Master Speech found here), and election into the 2020 American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A strong voice for music advocacy, Schneider has testified before the US Congressional Subcommittee on Intellectual Property on digital rights, has given commentary on CNN, participated in roundtables for the United States Copyright Office, has been quoted in numerous publications for her views on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Google, digital rights, and music piracy, and has written various white papers and articles on the digital economy as related to music and beyond. “Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine,” Schneider says. “We were the first to be used and traded for data.”
Data Lords is available exclusively at Mariaschneider.com.
l’Académie du Jazz (The French Jazz Academy) is the oldest and most respected music awards institution in France. Its successive presidents are well known in the world of arts and music (Jean Cocteau, André Hodeir, Maurice Cullaz, Stéphane Grappelli, Martial Solal, Claude Carrière, and current president François Lacharme). A non-profit association, the Academy is fiercely independent and collects votes from some 60 journalists, photographers, writers and radio/TV producers. Due to Covid, this year’s ceremony turned into a broadcast on Wednesday, March 10 via French radio FIP’s "Club Jazz à FIP” program. Only a few recipients attended and performed due to pandemic restrictions, but the rich history of the Académie du Jazz was discussed and the winners announced. The podcast of the program is available on fip.fr. Previous recipients of the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Jazz include Brad Mehldau, Joe Lovano, Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Christian McBride, among many others.
