[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Composer Maria Schneider

[Stephen G Barbone]

A while back we had a thread on Choro music. Check out the Maria  
Schneider orchestra and Choro. If you like it, read the wall Street  
Journal about her and/or go see her in performance this week in NYC.  
Multi talented reed man Scott Robinson is usually in her band playing  
Baritone Sax, Bass Clarinet and Clarinet. I believe that's him in the  
below clip on clarinet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_WA9tbBuAE

Reinventing the sound of Big Band Jazz - Wall Street Journal, Nov 20,  
2010 by Martin Johnson



Composer Maria Schneider Draws from Latin America  - and Even a Bird -  
to Bring Nuance to Her Orchestra's Music.



Seven years ago, when the Jazz Standard approached composer and  
bandleader Maria Schneider about performing a weeklong engagement with  
her 18-piece orchestra, she chose Thanksgiving week.

"It was the best chance I had of getting all my players together," she  
said earlier this month at her Upper West Side apartment.

"There is no question that Maria has, virtually single-handedly,  
changed the way we think about large jazz ensembles," said Darcy James  
Argue, leader of Secret Society, an up-and-coming jazz orchestra.By  
now, the Maria Schneider Orchestra's Thanksgiving week engagement,  
which will run from Tuesday through Sunday, has become a holiday  
tradition. Jazz fans come here specifically to attend multiple  
performances of the band, whose popularity has grown as a result, and  
Ms. Schneider has become recognized as a leading figure in jazz.

Ms. Schneider's music has shown that a jazz big band need not be a  
hard-charging battalion of brass and saxophones. It can produce an  
impressionistic mélange of sound, swelling around soloists and  
offering nuanced, richly evocative music.

Her style has touchstones in the orchestrations of Bob Brookmeyer and  
in the classics created by Gil Evans and Miles Davis in the early  
1960s. Ms. Schneider, who is 49, was born in Minnesota and, after  
attending the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., she moved to  
New York City in 1985 and worked with Mr. Evans. She launched her own  
orchestra in the early '90s, and from 1993 to 1998 her big band had a  
weekly Monday gig at Visiones, a now-defunct nightclub in Greenwich  
Village.

"Those were great, great years," Ms. Schneider said.

Her band developed an avid following and she relished creating pieces  
that would grow and develop so her hard-core fans would rarely hear  
the same piece played the same way twice. Many of the musicians who  
became part of the band during that time, such as the pianist Frank  
Kimbrough, still play with her today.

"The loyalty to her and to her music you see in the band is  
practically unheard of," Mr. Kimbrough said in a recent email. "I  
think a critic put it best a few years ago when he said that the band  
played as though each of us would take a bullet for her. … It's a  
funny thought, but not too far from the truth."

Ms. Schneider says the band will draw on its full repertoire at the  
Jazz Standard, ranging from pieces that haven't been performed  
regularly since their Visiones days to several newly commissioned works.

She records with Artist Share, a Web-based company that enables  
listeners to finance recordings and new works. For a nominal amount, a  
listener essentially preorders the finished product. But fans who  
contribute more money are afforded varying levels of access to the  
process; for instance, a key commissioner may attend rehearsals and  
recording sessions.

Ms. Schneider employed that structure for two new works, "Lembrança"  
and "The Thompson Fields."

"The notes can be simple," she said of those pieces and her work in  
general. "The challenge for my players is to communicate them with  
vision and feeling."

Ms. Schneider's new music has been influenced by her passion for  
Brazilian, Peruvian and Spanish music as well as her ornithological  
interests. An avid birder, she goes to Central Park daily during the  
spring. "It's a wonderland over there during the May migration," she  
said.

She was thinking of writing a piece that captured the birds' sense of  
flight and adventure when, on one visit, a Cerulean Warbler sang her a  
song. Her adaptation, "Cerulean Skies," in which some of her musicians  
contributed bird calls, won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental  
Composition in 2008.

Ms. Schneider is working on a second collaboration with the renowned  
soprano Dawn Upshaw. They first worked together on "Carlos Drummond de  
Andrade Stories," a 2008 work commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber  
Orchestra, which will have its New York premiere in the spring. Ms.  
Schneider's piano is festooned with poems by Ted Kooser, the raw  
materials for another future work.

Mr. Kimbrough says that while Ms. Schneider's music has been  
influenced by the sounds of the Iberian diaspora, her work is largely  
autobiographical.

"You will always be able to hear the open fields of her native  
Minnesota," he said.

Ms. Schneider still sees herself as the girl from Windom, Minn., but  
says she feels particularly comfortable in her Upper West Side  
neighborhood.

"It's like a small town in a big city," she said. "I can't imagine  
getting in a car and driving just to go to the supermarket; it seems  
so lonely."

—Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.