Listening with Maria Schneider

[Lazaro Vega]

November 17, 2006

Listening With | Maria Schneider

Keeping the Notes Dancing and Flying

By BEN RATLIFF

Clipped to the music desk of Maria Schneider’s upright

piano is a picture of the ballerina Sylvie Guillem.

Spread out all over it a few weeks ago were sketches

for a new composition, “Cerulean Skies,” for a

festival in Vienna programmed by Peter Sellars,

celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

It is a piece about the migration of birds, and Ms.

Schneider has been struggling with it, trying to get

the right quality of motion. When she composes, she

often plays a sequence into a tape recorder, then gets

up to play it back, and moves around the room to the

phrases of the music, seeing how it feels when danced.

“It helps me figure out where things are, and what

needs to be longer,” she said.

Much of Maria Schneider’s large- ensemble jazz of the

last six years has been nearly a figurative

description of long-flow movement, particularly

dancing or flying. And even when that’s not what it’s

really about — as it is in her piece “Hang Gliding” or

the various dances represented in her suite “Three

Romances” — that’s still, in a sense, what it’s really

about. In her Upper West Side apartment Ms. Schneider,

45, composes at the piano; onstage she stands and

conducts her band, which ranges from 17 to 20

musicians, and which will take up residence at Jazz

Standard next week. Judging herself a mediocre

pianist, she doesn’t play the instrument onstage; she

is one of the few well-known jazz composers who do not

perform with their own ensembles.

It is extremely unlikely in these times for a jazz

composer who isn’t also an instrumental star to keep a

17-piece band more or less intact for 13 years. But

she has managed it, through grants and ambitious

touring and, recently, an innovative system of

releasing recordings through the online label

ArtistShare, which treats customers as “members,”

allowing them not only to preorder her new music at

standard CD prices but, for a little more, to see how

its various parts are coming together, via

streaming-video updates.

Both the open, flowing sound of Ms. Schneider’s music

and its hopeful, nearly naïve sense of possibility

make some sense when laid against the details of her

life. Ms. Schneider and her two sisters grew up in

rural southwest Minnesota, in an agricultural town

called Windom, 150 miles from Minneapolis.

“We had all these big picture windows,” she said

recently, “and you’d look out the window and you’d see

nothin’.” She smiled. Ms. Schneider is blond and slim,

with large, deep-set eyes. When she talks about her

art, or about music that she likes, her dry voice

flushes and cracks, and she straightens her body and

moves her limbs to express something.

“When your entertainment isn’t provided for you,” she

continued, “your life is full of fantasy.” As a girl

Ms. Schneider would play the piano and imagine that

New York talent scouts might be driving nearby in cars

with radio antennae that could pick up her music and

discover her. “So I was always on, prepared for one of

these talent scouts.”

Her father designed machinery for processing flax, and

his company required him to get a pilot’s license so

he could fly to flax fields in Canada and North

Dakota. He kept his plane in a hangar behind the

family garage, and he would often take Ms. Schneider

flying with him. “When you’re in a small plane, and it

banks — when the plane goes like this?” She turned her

flat palm to a 90-degree angle. “The earth looked

perpendicular to the wing, and I used to look at the

earth and think that we were straight. I didn’t think

that we were tilted.”

Ms. Schneider learned something about musical motion

with Gil Evans, the great composer and arranger, who

died in 1988. After attending the Eastman School of

Music, She moved to New York and worked as his

assistant, copying scores, transcribing things,

helping Evans with arrangements. He never helped her

directly with her music — she didn’t presume to ask —

but she has since become, in a sense, his best-known

contemporary student. And her work has been frequently

compared to his, which, she says, suggests that people

don’t understand his work much. But it is an almost

inescapable conclusion: He is the precedent for her,

the Impressionism-influenced jazz composer who recused

himself as a pianist from some of his greatest work,

created his own sound colors and didn’t make typical

“big band” jazz.

She put on “Concierto de Aranjuez,” from “Sketches of

Spain,” one of Evans’s collaborations with Miles

Davis. It starts with castanets and harp; then soft

orchestral lines move in for the theme, before Davis

enters, a minute into the piece. “Check this out,” she

said.

Davis enters with a soft flourish, and the orchestra

goes into a kind of slow motion. “You know how Armani

knows how to dress a woman up and make her look just

incredible?” she asked. “Gil knew how to dress a

soloist and make that soloist so beautiful, you know?

So there’s all this fluttering — this movement, the

tuba’s playing these melodies, there’s all these

things going on — and when Miles enters, everything

stops.” As if stirring to life again, more lines form

after a minute, with curious crisscrossing momentum;

it sounds improvised, but it was all was precisely

composed.

Ms. Schneider once conducted the piece from a

transcription; then she did it again after Evans’s

original scores were found. She was amazed by the

difference. “I saw everything in them, and that’s when

I realized: It’s like a watch, where every little gear

attaches to something else. The music and the soloist

are an inseparable entity.”

What’s important to Ms. Schneider isn’t just standing

in front of a band and having it play her music, but

setting up structures for the improvisers so that

their phrasing becomes part of the music, which then

becomes part of her, so that it changes her subsequent

writing. (The bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie

evolved in much the same way.) Certainly a similarly

trusting approach applies to her unusual new method of

making records. With a movie camera, or a digital

audio recorder, Ms. Schneider documents each stage of

a new piece of music, including recording sessions,

even problematic recording sessions. The video can be

streamed from her Web site, mariaschneider.com.

This is quite an act of transparency for someone who

comes across as extremely anxious about the creative

process. But it seems to have worked: “Concert in the

Garden,” her latest record and her first with

ArtistShare, won a Grammy last year. She says the

process proves that a good piece can result from

unpromising beginnings. And she needs regular access

to that proof.

The turnaround moment for her band was her album

“Allegresse,” from 2000. Around that time her music

lost some of its academic stuffiness and its obsession

with vertical harmony. Part of this, she explains, was

a result of her having spent time in Brazil in 1998.

“I was going through tough times in my life,” she

said. “When we landed in Rio and I saw the landscape,

I knew my life was going to change.”

She put on a track called “A Maldade Não Tem Fim,”

from an album by Velha Guarda da Portela, the dynastic

group formed by the elders of the Portela samba

school, which competes annually in Rio’s carnival.

It’s a lovely song, typical of its kind: trombone over

the mandolinlike cavaquinho and the tambourinelike

pandeiros; a male voice singing the verses scratchily,

a thunder of voices coming in on the chorus.

“What I love in Brazilian music,” Ms. Schneider said,

“is that the way they’re singing is sustenance. It’s

not about making music either for entertainment or for

the conservatory — you know, music is here” — she

spread her hands apart — “and your life is here. Life

and music are one. The music I love is necessary for

life, for survival.

“Flamenco: it makes living possible. Blues, and early

jazz: it made living possible. Samba is like alchemy.

It turns pain into joy, into magic. My music was very

intense and serious and very jazz, even though it was

influenced by classical music.” But after the trip to

Brazil, “my priorities changed,” she said. “I really

didn’t care if my music impressed anybody anymore, or

if it was complex.”

When she got home, she didn’t immediately start

writing in the style of samba. She began borrowing

rhythm, loosely, from the more jazz-influenced choro

style of Brazilian music. Later she moved toward

flamenco, with its 12/8 buleria rhythm. She has since

become obsessed with the accordion as a new voice in

her ensemble; to several pieces she has added a cajon,

the percussive wooden box of Peruvian music, and she

hasn’t written with swing rhythm since.

She is still a jazz composer, by self-identification,

working with jazz improvisers. But the music is

pulling further away from any sort of conventional

jazz.

“Sometimes I feel like, in the world of jazz, people

think that more chromaticism all the time is going to

make their music hipper,” she said disappointedly.

“It’s like, no. Music is a time-oriented art. So it’s

how you play a person’s attention through time.

“I mean, here and there you’ll capture an experience

in jazz that just makes you go ....” She opened her

eyes wide and gasped. “But to me it happens less and

less, and I think that’s because musicians think they

have to keep playing more and more. Sometimes I leave

those clubs and come home and listen to Bach cello

suites. One line. Some space around one note. Or

nothing. Nothing for weeks on end.”

Finally she wanted — really wanted — to hear “Up — Up

and Away,” the hit by the Fifth Dimension, written by

Jimmy Webb. It entered her bloodstream when she was a

girl, she said. During the first lyric line (“Would

you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?”), Ms.

Schneider cocked a finger.

“Now check this out,” she said. ”Modulation, up a

minor fifth. That’s the flying modulation. It’s all

over my new music.” She mentioned a few of her songs

that contained similar modulations: “Hang Gliding,”

“Coming About.”

“And now: up another minor third.” (The Fifth

Dimension was singing, “For we can flyyy ...”) “Now

it’s going down—let’s see — a major third. And you

hear the flutes?” (They appeared after the line “It

wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.”) “That’s

Gil Evans, I’m sorry.” (The influence is entirely

possible: the arrangements were by Marty Paich, a West

Coast jazz arranger and a contemporary of Evans.)

She seemed self-conscious that she was praising an AM

radio tune from her childhood in terms that should be

reservied for Major Works of Art. But she raved:

“Jimmy Webb is a genius, I’m sorry. That tune

modulates six times, if not more. Ah. I get chills. Am

I crazy? Who could dare to write that? It modulates as

much as ‘Giant Steps’ does.” (She was referring to the

John Coltrane composition, of which she has written

her own inventive arrangement.)

Motion, flying, nostalgia: it seems important, this

thing about flying in your father’s plane, I said, a

little embarrassed by the obviousness of the

psychology.

To my surprise, she grew excited. “Maybe because of

the motion, the openness and the motion,” she said. “I

never thought about it.”

The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra will appear Tuesday

and Wednesday, and Nov. 24 and 26, at Jazz Standard,

116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232,

jazzstandard.net; cover, $30.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/arts/mus...&oref=login

[JSngry]

Finally somebody else recognizes the genius of "Up Up & Away"!

Love ya' for that, Maria.

[ghost of miles]

I'm with ya, man! Up, Up and Away

I need to order that new Maria CD. Anybody else heard it yet?

[LWayne]

I love Maria's music as well! The new CD has not been released as yet as I believe it is being recorded early next year.

LWayne

[ghost of miles]

I love Maria's music as well! The new CD has not been released as yet as I believe it is being recorded early next year.

LWayne

Sorry, meant the live one--At the Jazz Standard/Days of Wine and Roses. I think it's due out some time this month. Yeah, Sky Blue is the next studio one, still in the works.

[mailman]

Anyone going to see her this week at the Jazz Standard? I'm going to the early set tonight. I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't seen her before.

[SGUD missile]

Anyone going to see her this week at the Jazz Standard? I'm going to the early set tonight. I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't seen her before.

I only wish I could.

I had the rare privelege of hearing the MS Ensemble **live** last year in Seattle @ Jazz Alley and I can tell you ( both as a musician and a fan ) hearing and seeing Maria and the group is a revelation it's hard to compare with the audio experience alone.

Anyone in the NYC area ..GO!!!!

Edited November 22, 2006 by SGUD missile

[mailman]

Anyone going to see her this week at the Jazz Standard? I'm going to the early set tonight. I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't seen her before.

I only wish I could.

I had the rare privlige of hearing the MS Ensemble **live** last year in Seattle @ Jazz Alley and I can tell you ( both as a musician and a fan ) hearing and seeing Maria and the group is a revelation it's hard to compare with the audio experience alone.

Anyone in the NYC area ..GO!!!!

The music was fantastic. She had a least 20 musicians and both sets last night were sold out. I took someone who had never heard of Maria before and the my guest was floored. A great night of music. Wish I could go again this week but the whole run seems to be sold out.

Edited November 23, 2006 by mailman