Jazz within broad classical structures
To say that Maria Schneider is a path-breaking jazz artist seems somewhat of an understatement. She’s in the vanguard, both artistically (with the gloriously sumptuous sound of her 18-member jazz orchestra) and business-wise (selling albums and related goods exclusively over the Internet). Here 2004 album Concert in the Garden became the first jazz CD ever to win a Grammy Award without in-store distribution. Her latest, last year’s critically hailed Sky Blue, cost $175,000 to produce, virtually prohibitive for a jazz musician; confidently she says any profits will be invested in the next album. A critics and fan favorite, the 48-year-old perennial poll-winner (for big band and arranger) is at the apex of her career.
“I felt I wanted to be a musician but wasn’t so presumptuous to think of myself as a composer,” Maria Schneider says over the phone from New York. “And I had no idea that the history of jazz was something that was still evolving. The only jazz I had been exposed to was very early jazz. When I first moved to New York when I left college part of me thought I might do film scoring. Then I ended up starting a band it kind of grew and grew, but it wasn’t something I set out to do. But as I look back on it now it’s kind of easy to see the paths: my first piano teacher was both a stride and classical pianist.”
Her romantic impressionism is writ large, a brilliant blend of urbanity and heartland innocence. She speaks forthrightly, with exactitude, yet she gushes like a schoolgirl with enthusiasms for her mentors, legendary jazz arrangers/composers Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, and for ArtistShare, the Internet outfit that distributes her work.
She’s also feisty in describing her position in the musical firmament: Jazz within broad classical structures. While some compare her expansive sound to that of Mahler, she says, “I don’t get it, having never made a deep study of Mahler.” When I suggested Debussy, she ventured with “more like Ravel, even Hindemith.”
The meeting of jazz and classical is a strange one, with composers on both sides poaching each other’s turf. Hot jazz of the ‘20s fascinated Frenchmen like Darius Milhaud and Maurice Ravel, and Stravinsky composed a concerto for Woody Herman. George Gershwin went from Tin Pan Alley to High Art with Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess and defined the hybrid American vernacular. Duke Ellington was famously panned for his extended 53-minute suite Black Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The Modern Jazz Quartet dressed in tuxedoes to deliver chamber jazz, and played Bach to boot. This all culminated in the 1950s with Third Stream, an idiosyncratic movement concocted by composer-historian Gunther Schuller.
Here is where Schneider parts company with Schuller: “Third Stream felt like two things coming together but kind of clashing. The thing that attracted me to Gil (Evans) was that he had this lightness – this airy delicacy of classical music – organically within. Same thing with Bob (Brookmeyer) in his long forms. It’s a choice that should be made for the music, not just to put two idioms together. See, I believe that if somebody creates music they should have an idea of a sound – and then use all the techniques that they can get together to bring that sound into being. As opposed to looking at techniques and then trying to create a sound – you’ll never create music that floats into another realm beyond just a musical idiom. So I kind of thought Third Stream was more like an idea than a musical impulse.”
She also recalls one of her earliest major influences, Duke Ellington, by using the improvisational styles of her stellar cast as raw material. “My musicians have influenced me on many levels, in their ways of soloing and phrasing, the kind of blend they achieve. It’s not like I’m writing for a rigid instrumentation, I’m writing for a set of individuals whose playing I’m really familiar with.”
Preparing the release of Sky Blue, she relates, was intense and time-consuming: “Writing the music, rehearsing it, taking it on the road so I can develop the music with the players – that’s years right there. As for the mixing I worked virtually non-stop from January to when it came out in July. Six months of just solid work, I mean, it was huge. And just when you’ve finished the mixing, then you’ve got to master and do the liner notes. Every time I do an album it just about kills me and I say ‘never again.’”
The jazz orchestra, she says, is perhaps “a harder medium to create for because there’s so many musicians involved and trying to make it sound organic, is not easy. Believe me, this isn’t for everybody, you don’t really want this, it can get really crazy. I can’t emphasize enough how time-consuming and stressful it is to make a good record. You work really hard to make it sound just natural and easy – but it’s not so easy. I took total pains to be a perfectionist on these records.”
Taking the orchestra on tour is prohibitively expensive, “so we go through little spurts, here and there. When we go on the road it’s usually a break-even proposition or an investment. For many years I was losing money. I’ve been investing in the band for a long time now, taking huge risks.”
After recording several albums for the German label Enja, she hooked up with [ADD] founder of ArtistShare, an Internet-only retailer. The idea behind ArtistShare is just that: skip the middleman, sell directly to fans, and pocket 85 percent of the gross. “More than that, we would sell the whole musical experience. We made videos of the rehearsals and put up clips and sold them. If people preordered they could log onto the site and follow the whole process of the record. People could come in on different levels of participation, buy the MP3, buy the CD, they could be a gold, silver or bronze participant and get their names on the record, for $18,000 become an executive producer and get to come to the recording sessions. Any money I have left gets invested into the next record. We can sell anything – scores and parts, recordings were the soloist is removed so the listener can play along their own improvisation with my band. There’s a lot of fun stuff.”
Coming up in the late ‘80s, a NEA grant gave her the opportunity to study with Bob Brookmeyer, smoothly inventive trombone-playing jazz composer/arranger, from 1986 to 1991. Meanwhile, she also worked for the last great band led by Gil Evans, the quietly hip Canadian who shepherded Davis’ Birth of the Cool sessions 60 years ago and was working with him on Sketches of Spain 50 years ago. His airy, mellifluous arrangements are as distinctive as Phil Spector’s wall of sound.
Schneider admires Evans for his “trans-elusive orchestrations, the lightness, the space, the air in the sound. The intricacy, all the details, I love that, all the inner lines …” Bob Brookmeyer, she says, shines “in his long forms, the forms that are more classical in nature than on a difficult jazz solo, he writes extended forms. By then my music was becoming more like classical music meets jazz than (the style of) Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, which was more of a typical big band. Bob is very opinionated, absolutely, but he was very good to me as a teacher and incredibly good to me as a friend. He’s been very generous. I think he really helped me find my own voice musically.”
Brookmeyer is “still the man I go to when I get stuck or frustrated. He's my real support,” she told Down Beat. He described her as “already a fully developed writer when she came to me … I offered a combination of emotional and professional support, especially of her role as a woman in jazz, because that's something that needs to be addressed, since jazz has a history of being a male enclave.” He worked her into the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, and she wrote for the Village Vanguard Orchestra.
She formed the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra in 1992, performing weekly at the Manhattan club Visiones from 1993 until its demise in 1998. During this time they recorded Evanescence, dedicated to Evans’s memory, and nominated for two Grammy awards.
Schneider, wrote Village Voice critic Gary Giddens in 1995, “understands the texture of the orchestra as few young composers do, and at 34, her promise is enormous.” She’s been delivering bigtime on the promise ever since, at the top of fan and critics polls.
More than half the original musicians of that first orchestra in 1993 are still with the group. Pianist Frank Kimbrough is a further delight …
“Each of these pieces began when I cast out a few exploratory tones in search of meaningful sound,” she writes in the detailed liner notes for Sky Blue. “Given a little gestation time, the seeds of each piece started to pop, revealing something very personal. I found myself either on a journey back in time or deep inside myself – in both cases feeling like I was uncovering much more than I had from the original experience. Experiences transmuted into sound and in two cases, actually became sonic stories.”
While she doesn’t like talking about her gender – women in a traditional male bastion - the strawberry blond looks ravishing on her album cover photos. As critic Terry Teachout noted in Time in 2000: “To call Schneider the most important woman in jazz is missing the point … She’s a major composer – period.”
And she’s a cheerleader for quality. She raves about Vancouver-born Darcy James Argue, a former student of hers, and a McGill alum who last year played a memorable Sala Rossa concert with the Canadian version of his Secret Society Orchestra. “I’m really curious about his first record. He has the energy and personality to make it happen.”
Her most recent opus is Cerulean Fields, a vision of birds in migration that she will perform in Montreal. “It’s fun to do it outdoors because of all the bird calls we use. In a concert in Belgium we distributed birdcalls in the audience, and the birds were going insane defending their territory from the bombardment of some calls they’d ever heard before. Like, who’s moved in here? Alien birds have landed!” Schneider’s touch-down at the festival is eagerly anticipated.
2009