The final headline concert of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival, at Vicar Street on Sunday evening, provided some beautiful music by Maria Schneider, one of the most accomplished big-band arrangers and composers in jazz today, well performed by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra.
And if almost everything played came from the three albums she has made so far - Coming About, Evanescence and AllΘgresse - it was still a thrill to hear them live and to get some insight into the distinctive sounds she has created.
The instrumentation is standard: four trumpets doubling flugelhorns, three trombones, one bass trombone, five saxophones doubling just about everything in the reed family, and four rhythm.
Yet through a combination of open and muted brass, blending of sections and superbly voiced chords, she creates sensuously diaphanous soundscapes, steadily developing them into full compositions a world removed from the basic theme-and-variations approach that has sustained big-band jazz for so long.
Although perhaps best appreciated in slower pieces, she also makes it work at faster tempos, as evidenced by the opening, marvellously controlled AllΘgresse, and by Green Piece and the minatory Dance You Monster To My Soft Song.
Unfortunately, although the Brussels Jazz Orchestra is fine as a unit, its solo strength seems for the most part distinguished by competence more than brilliance.
A stronger second set, with some of Schneider's most delightful compositions in Evanescence, Sea Of Tranquillity and Hang Gliding, produced some improvement in that area. In Hang Gliding, the evening's piΦce de rΘsistance, the beautiful solo of flugelhornist Michel ParΘ underlined the fact that the impact of Schneider's writing is diffused if the soloists don't match its quality - a point already emphasised on Evanescence, where a dull bass solo and a competent alto one were followed by excellent trombone work by Marc Godfroid.
Schneider also offered three arrangements of standards: Love Theme From Spartacus, That Old Black Magic and My Ideal. And though they were full of typically lovely voicings, their form is too constricted for someone with Schneider's marvellously expansive imagination.
