Concert in the Garden


Concert in the Garden is the fourth studio album by American jazz composer Maria Schneider. The album was released in 2004 by ArtistShare and won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2005.
In 2019, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Background

Schneider's three previous albums were nominated for Grammy Awards, but the previous one, Allégresse, was released four years before Concert in the Garden. The delay has been attributed to the financial difficulty of recording with large groups, which are required for the music that Schneider writes.
Compared to previous albums, this album is more classical than jazz, with a greater influence of Brazilian, Spanish, and flamenco music.

Reception

The JazzTimes review was mostly positive, stating, "Three Romances" and "Buleria, Solea y Rumba" "are revelatory in their complete realization", but the solos on the title track "are not strong enough to provide sufficient contrast to the piece's slow, hovering progress".
The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave the album a maximum four stars and added it to the book's Core Collection. It stated that the title-track was “a slight disappointment”, but overall the album was "the great achievement of her career so far."

Legacy

The album was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2019. In its citation, the Library of Congress stated that, alongside its musical merits, Concert in the Garden's release on ArtistShare, the first ever commercial crowdfunding website, as well as becoming the first-ever Grammy-winning album to be sold on the Internet instead of in stores, marked it as a trailblazer in music distribution, opening the door for ways "to respond to fan-driven demand for styles of music not otherwise readily available, while offering artists greater control over their work."

Personnel