Maria Schneider and Oslo Jazz Ensemble

A rare performance of composer-arranger Maria Schneider’s acclaimed album Data Lords received a UK premiere at the Barbican and unleashed her darkly beautiful music on a rapt London audience. Anger is not a word you’d normally associate with the airy, exquisitely-layered orchestral jazz of the Minnesota-born Schneider. But it’s a word she used in her introduction at the Barbican conducting the Oslo Jazz Ensemble in which a darker, edgier strain than usual underpinned her compositional arrangements.

She was referring to the tracks the ensemble were about to perform from The Digital World, which is one half of her US orchestra’s 2020 album Data Lords (also voted Jazzwise’s Album of the Year that year).

The hard-hitting dystopian programmatic music that made up half the set represented Schneider’s protest against a fast growing toxicity in today’s digital world; for her a dangerous intrusion on human values as well as musicians’ rights, the latter of which she’s been not just a spokesperson but an activist, for example with her exclusive crowdfunded ArtistShare releases. It also made for the most exhilarating moments of the show tonight. Norway is quite unique in breeding high-quality large ensembles that combine free spirited imaginative soloing and collective ensemble play with brilliant technique and this evening’s 18-piece Oslo Jazz Ensemble was no exception.

Of the highlights ‘Don’t be Evil’, titled after Google’s unintentionally ironic 2004 company motto, was the closest to resembling the music of her old mentor/employer Gil Evans; a vehicle for guitarist Jens Thoresen’s expressive rock-metal lines and Ingrid Utne’s stabbing phat-bottom bass trombone, which announced the forbidding low-register orchestration at the heart of tonight’s set.

Other highlights included the richly atmospheric sci-fi soundtrack-like ‘Sputnik’ that warned of infinite Elon Musk-controlled satellites, with its Mehldau-ish piano vamp, and Tina Lægrid Olsen’s searchingly lyrical baritone sax brilliantly developed against Schneider’s sky-lit orchestration that elevated to far-off galaxies alongside an increasingly forbidding bass-horn fanfare.

‘CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?’ – dedicated to her father’s ventures in ham radio – mixed György Ligeti with Morse code rhythms and set her dad’s geeky exploration of early radio communications against modern-day digital developments with an old-school instrumental battle between a ‘natural’ tenor sax (solo by Martin Myhre Olsen) and a digitally-effected trumpet punctuated by a Quincy Jones-like noir horn-led theme.

The set’s climax perhaps fittingly produced an Armageddon moment: “I’m sorry to tell you we no longer exist at the end of this piece,” Schneider announced deadpan, the house lights going down following a Sketches of Spain-styled feature for trumpeter Marius Haltli on the title track ‘Data Lords’. She reverted to type for an encore: “I didn‘t want to leave you with annihilation,” she said as the band launched into a short pastoral waltz ‘Braided Together’ inspired by a verse of the Pullitzer Prize-winning poet Ted Kooser and taken from the Our Natural World half of the recording. It characterized an exceptional performance tastefully balanced between light and dark, though Schneider’s beautifully nuanced arrangements always shone through.