Frank Kimbrough on Maria Schneider
I’ve been working with Maria since March of 1993 when she began a weekly gig with her orchestra at Visiones, a small, now defunct club in Greenwich Village. The gig was originally planned to last for two months of Mondays, and ended up stretching to five years. This was a period of musical bonding that …
Maria Schneider and Dawn Upshaw at Carnegie in May
Maria Schneider’s music has been hailed by critics as “evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and beyond categorization.” For the past 20 years Schneider has written primarily for her own jazz orchestra, yet during those years she was pushing boundaries, augmenting the standard 17-piece band with an accordion here, or flamenco cajon there, mixing in Brazilian rhythms …