Overview:
Sky Blue is another well written Maria Schneider album. Once again Schneider has written complex hand crafted tunes for her big band that interweave many different parts and feature some great soloists. The overall style of this album is world jazz fusion. Schneider has incorporated many sounds and styles of South America into this release. Over twenty musicians play on Sky Blue, including personal favorites, Donny McCaslin on tener sax & clarinet, and guitarist Ben Monder. Big band fans, and Schneider fans alike will enjoy this recent release and should add it to their collection. However, jazz fans who are only considering this album because of the rave reviews it received in many magazines and online publications may want to reconsider. While this is a nice album, it doesn't come close to being one of the top CDs of 2007.

Song Highlights:
Aires de Lando: The "Aires" here no doubt refers to Buenos Aires as this song incorporates many latin themes and tango elements. Schneider has beautifully integrated latin rhythms and tango moods into wonderful South American fusion. The accordian integration is particullary nice.

Rich's Piece: This song has some really nice moody horn arrangements that somewhat resemeble arrangements from Mile Davis and Gill Evans Porgy and Bess. Over the top of these somber horns Rich Perry has a brilliant sax solo.

Cerulean Skies: This is the song which received the most hype in the reviews of this album. Further it features Donny McCaslin (one of my favorite sax players) as a soloist as well as Gary Versace on an accoridian solo. I had extremely high expectations for this song and I was disappointed. The song opens with some bird calls and has the feel of the amazon rain forest. Some listeners may find this this to be a bit "new agey". Persoanlly I thinked it worked and the song was off to a good start. McCaslin then comes in with the first solo. The solo starts off nice, and McCaslin's solo starts to build. Its at this point that the song goes off track. As McCaslin's solo builds the backing arrangements are just annoying and cheesy and take away from the solo. After McCaslin is done it's accordian player Versace's turn. This section of the song is prety nice but seems a bit out of place. At this point the song is starting to seem a bit long and your only halfway through it. Cerulean Skies is the center piece of this album and it doesn't live up to the hype.

Maria Schneider is a new breed of Jazz composer. This album is complex with sophisticated orchestration. The aural imagery is fantastic. If you are a Bebop aficionado, it is difficult to say how you'll respond to the developed orchestral sound of this album. There are some interesting time signatures, and the structure is basically tonal being based on complementary melodic themes. The overall pacing is patient rather than the often relentless sense of urgency typically found with, say, Rollins and Coltrane, and hitting its zenith with Coleman. Rich Perry does some nice tenor sax work that lulls you right along. Settle down with a good single-malt scotch, relax, and let Schneider move you to where she wants you to go, rather than where you think you should go. A little cloying at times.

I could not agree more with the previous review , I'm not sure about new age music , but Maria is a genius in marketing , she made a cd so hard to get , than I jumped on the first chance to get it ( Itunes ...thank you ! ) Except the Brazilian track, which I like the most, I got lost in her music, did not really move me , maybe the length of it, 20 minutes tracks! Maybe the arrangement. A lot of noise for not so much music ......sorry! Maybe watching these musicians playing live might work better, but on cd, its a different story.
It's not a terrible project, probably a very personnelone , but honestly I did get it .

3 1/2 Stars. Jazz Times (magazine) rated this the #2 jazz album of 2007, ahead of acclaimed recordings by McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, and others, including an outstanding big band date by Charles Tolliver's group. (Jazz Times' # 1 album of 2007 was the late Michael Brecker's PILGRIMAGE.) So, although I was not familar with Maria Schneider, I had fairly high expectations upon ordering this CD. (It was also mildly exciting to order it because of its limited availability-not in your local stores; only through a "fan-based" website [via Amazon]).

The music IS lovely and often interesting (especially track 2, with its unusual and appealing Latin rhythm). The arrangements and orchestrations are very good, and there's some fine soloing by several different musicians. At times, the music harkens back to Gil Evans; occasionally, the lush colors and sonorities even remind me of John Scofield's fine album QUIET. Not infrequently, though, I detect a "new age" influence--and it's not just the many bird calls. Personally, I don't care much for the new age thing (I find it a trifle boring), but if you're OK with it, you might really like this music. I'm lukewarm.

Five BIG Stars!! This is a wonderful big band jazz performance by the awesome Grammy-winning and multiple DownBeat Jazz Poll-winning composer, arranger, and orchestra leader Maria Schneider. Her large 17 piece group comes up big with a HUGE performance on her third CD. With superb soloists, unusual shifting tempos, and orchestrations that range from solo instruments out of tempo to huge dense orchestral colorations unlike any you'll find in jazz or any other music, this is wonderful jazz that is very inspiring and intellectually stimulating. Ms Schneider is influenced by her mentor, the legendary Gil Evans, but bears her own individual music stamp with quicksilver music that ranges from deep introspection to high exultation. She paints on a huge sonic canvas that at once evokes the sweeping strokes of painter Jackson Pollock and the pointillism of Georges Seurat, while giving seven of her talented musicians lots of solo time in their respective songs, which shows the capabilities of the overall orchestra. Neither conventional 4/4 swing nor New Age, it's very exotic & fascinating stuff that pulled me into the sonic canvas. It's the direct descendant of the symphonic Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus, and maestro Evans, but with her own adventurous twists and turns.

Each song is a 'Piece De Resistance' in itself using multiple tempos, extensive solo time, dense sonic layers, and unusual effects. On "The 'Pretty' Road", Ingrid Jensen's blazing serpentine-like solo goes from flugelhorn to trumpet to electronic trumpet layers. Guest vocalist Luciana Souza wordlessly soars above it all. "Aires de Lando" is a halting, tango-like theme with a wild virtousic clarinet solo by Scott Robinson that builds to a crescendo with the orchestra pushing and complementing the solo. The whole orchestra virtually 'comps' behind the solo in a really weird and wonderful effect that almost approaches a solo in itself as it surges ahead of the clarinet at places. A unusual but terrific performance!! "Rich's Piece" has a air of foreboding and dissonance behind the extensive slithery Rich Perry tenor sax solo, with rising waves of sound that dissipate only to rise again, and shifting instrumental clusters of sound, with Jay Anderson's free roaming bass commenting underneath. The epic "Cerulean Skies", the 2007 Grammy winner for Instrumental Composition, is almost 22 minutes of musical wonder, populated by a forest of orchestral bird and forest-like effects that bend perfectly to the arc of the song's theme before the entire song lifts and soars into the sonic sky, with a hip backbeat and a dash of funk. Grammy-nominated reed man Donny McCaslin gets off a wild tenor sax solo that ranks as one of the year's best jazz solos as he surfs the valleys, mountains, and canyons of Ms Schneider's awesome orchestrations with Ms Souza again making an appearance. But this is only half of this epic sonic masterwork, I'll leave the rest of this discovery to you. Ms Schneider's music is brought to us through fan-financed ArtistShare, whose website sells it either directly or through other specific sellers. After a month of being blown away by these performances, this wonderful Grammy-nominated CD with the 2007 Best Instrumental Composition Grammy-winning "Cerulean Skies," gets My Highest Recommendation. Five AMAZING Stars!!
(audio CD, 63:11 total running time, LP-type CD-sized sleeve, with liner notes in a separate booklet insert.)