Knowing When to Improvise
11/18/2004 8:45 AM | | Jazz composer and alumna Maria Schneider |
By Dan Emerson
In the midst of writing a new composition, jazz composer Maria Schneider (B.A. ’83) read “Concert in the Garden,” a poem by Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. With its vivid metaphors of wind, rain, and music, of the world opening like a double blossom of sadness and joy, the poem transported Schneider to a place she hadn’t visited since childhood: a tree house overlooking a lake near her childhood home in southwestern Minnesota. Schneider could hear the sweeping prairie winds, see the soaring great blue herons, and feel herself becoming lost in that treasured place.
Paz’s poem and the memories it elicited inspired Schneider’s new work. She named the piece “Concert in the Garden” and gave her new album the same title. “When I create a piece, I don’t just sit down and write,” Schneider explains. “Sometimes I’ll write some music, and all of a sudden those musical ideas attach themselves to a memory from my life. It’s an almost cinemagraphic experience; I can almost see a movie at that point.”
Since her recording debut a decade ago, the Windom, Minnesota, native has become recognized as one of the top composers in jazz, earning critical acclaim and several Grammy nominations along the way. Although Schneider has lived and worked in New York City since 1985, her experience composing “Concert in the Garden” illustrates that Minnesota is still part of that impressionistic creative process. “Some people say they hear a kind of openness or expansiveness in my music,” Schneider says. “It doesn’t surprise them to find out that I was raised on the prairie.”
“Her approach is fresh and new,” says Dean Sorenson (B.A. ’86), interim director of jazz studies at the University of Minnesota who met Schneider when both were undergraduate music majors. “A listener needs to hear only a few bars and her ‘sound’ is evident. This is certainly true in her own compositions, but also true when she arranges other pieces. She can put her musical stamp on an arrangement, yet still retain the character of the original piece—a very unique talent. Maria’s style allows for the perfect balance of composed and improvised music.”
Schneider began taking piano lessons at age 5. Her first teacher was Evelyn Butler, a jazz pianist from Chicago who had moved to Windom to care for a relative. After dinner at the Schneiders’ one evening, Butler gave a stride piano performance that drew the young Schneider from the other room. “She sat down and played the piano and it was almost like The Wizard of Oz, when everything changes into color,” Schneider recalls. “I could almost see images floating above her as she played. She was not only a magnificent pianist but a special musician who could manifest personality in her music.”
Schneider decided right then that she wanted to play the piano.
Butler was eccentric. She wore rhinestones in her red hair, purple muumuus, and green satin slippers. She taught Schneider for 13 years, beginning with jazz and classical theory. She also schooled Schneider to understand the emotion in music—for example, comparing the sunny sound of a major triad with the somber feel of a minor chord, just a half-step down the keyboard. “She taught me to be intrigued by emotion in music,” Schneider says.
Schneider’s eventual decision to focus on jazz rather than classical music was shaped by another impromptu piano performance in her parents’ living room, when she was in high school. A neighbor’s niece visiting from the East Coast played a Mozart concerto that had won first place in a competition. “In that moment, my heart fell. I realized there was no way I would be a [professional] classical pianist,” Schneider says.
A few minutes later, however, Schneider entertained the gathering by playing a few Christmas carols with improvised jazz embellishments. “The other girl was looking at this in awe,” Schneider recalls. “I had unintentionally deflated something in her, and I started to realize I was a musician at heart.”
Schneider enrolled at the University of Minnesota as a music theory major but had no particular career in mind. Looking back, however, she can point to numerous people and chance experiences that shaped her ultimate decision to become a jazz composer.
One of her formative experiences took place outside the classroom, in her Territorial Hall dorm room. “I was steeped in stride piano, but I hadn’t heard any modern jazz—I thought jazz hadn’t developed past the swing era,” she says. “This kid heard me playing an old [Duke] Ellington record. He loaned me some jazz albums by people like Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, and McCoy Tyner. I listened to those and my head started spinning.”
In the classroom, she notes two professors who gave her the tools she would one day employ: Dominick Argento, who taught a class on orchestration and exploring the use of instrumental colors (writing arrangements that produce a desired blend of sounds), and Paul Fetler (B.A. ’56), who taught advanced counterpoint (music that has two or more melody lines sounding simultaneously). “We spent a lot of time studying the art of the fugue, and also the math and geometry behind all that beauty,” she says. “These men were brilliant.” Fetler urged Schneider to write a piece for the University concert band.
Schneider recalls a performance by the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in the early 1980s that she describes as a pivotal moment. “It was beautiful and compelling,” she says. “Here was jazz music being played on the stage of a concert hall by a huge band on tour. A lightbulb went on that this could be a career for me, although it seemed impossible to make a living as a composer.”
Schneider graduated with a degree in theory and composition, but writing for a jazz orchestra still seemed daunting. “I wasn’t sure I was compositionally strong enough to do that,” she says. “I never had too much confidence and was always testing whether I was trying to do something I had no business doing. Maybe because I was from a small town I wasn’t sure if I had what it would take.”
According to Sorenson, part of Schneider’s success is the result of sheer effort. “She was working constantly,” he recalls. “I regularly use her as an example to my students as someone to whom hard work has paid dividends. She certainly is blessed with talent, but she also makes the most of what she has by working very hard. I know these habits continue to this day.”
After graduating from the University and spending a semester at the University of Miami, Schneider was accepted to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where she earned her master’s in jazz writing and contemporary media, in 1985. Eager to further develop as a writer, she moved to New York City and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study with Bob Brookmeyer, an esteemed trombonist and composer/arranger. But to survive, Schneider put to use a practical skill she learned at the University of Minnesota. Argento had required his orchestration students to copy neatly in pen and ink each score they wrote. “I learned to be a really good calligrapher, and that’s how I made my living [as a music copyist] for eight years in New York City while composing in my off time,” Schneider explains.
A chance meeting with another musician led to a break: a position working as a copyist for Gil Evans, the famed composer whose “Birth of the Cool” scores written for trumpeter Miles Davis were some of the most influential recordings in jazz history. Schneider worked as Evans’ assistant for three years, including collaborating on the score for the film The Color of Money and arrangements for Sting’s 1987 European tour with the Gil Evans Orchestra.
Schneider was becoming known in the jazz world and her confidence grew. Her work with Evans, who died in 1988, had led to meeting other jazz musicians in New York, and in 1989 she began putting her own orchestra together. “Eventually I needed to write for a group with no preordained style, a group to test my own ideas and develop my own sound,” Schneider wrote in the notes to her first CD. Her band performed in New York for three years, and an offshoot of this group formed her recording orchestra.
Evanescence, Schneider’s first CD, was nominated for two 1995 Grammy Awards: Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance and, for its title piece, Best Instrumental Composition. Her second and third CDs, Coming About (1996) and Allegresse (2000), were also nominated for Grammys, the latter chosen by both Time and Billboard as one of the 10 best recordings of 2000. (She also released a live CD, Days of Wine and Roses: Live at the Jazz Standard, in 2000.) Schneider has received Jazz Journalist Awards for Best Composer, Best Arranger, and, for her orchestra, Best Big Band. She has also won a number of Downbeat and JazzTimes magazines critics’ and readers’ polls.
Schneider’s music has a spacious feel that is similar to Evans’s. She also learned from him to pay attention to the way instruments blend and interact. “I don’t use typical big band orchestration,” Schneider says. “I treat the big band like a chamber group—not the ‘wall of sound’ approach,” the heavy-handed brass often used in big band music.
Music critics have had difficulty categorizing Schneider’s compositions as either jazz or classical since they employ elements of both. Schneider says jazz improvisations typically use the harmonic form of a song as a structure that repeats itself, but she usually doesn’t follow that convention. “My approach to form changes drastically from piece to piece. One piece is apt to wind and twist and develop, passing through various textures and temperaments.”
To create expressive sonic textures, she sometimes uses instruments not often heard in jazz, such as oboe, bass flute, English horn, and accordion. Although her music has classical elements, much of it could not be played properly by classical musicians because of the improvisation required—and because some of the rhythmic nuances of Brazilian, flamenco, and other types of music “are not meant to be notated,” Schneider explains. Blending sounds to evoke a shifting range of moods, Schneider often gives verbal instructions to the musicians, such as describing a feeling of gravity pushing down on a rhythm. “Although it’s very orchestrated,” she says, “the players contribute a lot to the development of the music.”
Between recordings, Schneider maintains a busy schedule of performing, traveling, and composing. She has earned commissions from a number of European orchestras, including Orchestre National de Jazz in Paris, the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra in Copenhagen, and Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands. In 2003, Schneider arranged and conducted an entire show of works by famed Brazilian composer Ivan Lins, played by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. She recently made another foray into pop music, creating an arrangement for the latest CD by rock group Phish. Schneider has also been a guest lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music and has presented a composing/arranging clinic. Two years ago, she and her orchestra made a tour stop at Northrop Auditorium.
Schneider’s new CD also represents a new direction in marketing her music, selling Concert in the Garden only through her Web site. Although her first three studio albums earned her critical acclaim, she lost money on each—not uncommon for recording artists.
With Concert in the Garden, Schneider and Web company ArtistShare offer subscribers behind-the-scenes access to the creative process. Fellow composers and students can download scores, lectures, and analyses and participate in online conversations. The new Internet model not only helps finance each recording project, it will enable Schneider to receive a much larger share of the proceeds than she would under a traditional record company contract. And she can avoid being pigeonholed for commercial purposes. “When you’re not in a record store, your music doesn’t have to be categorized,” Schneider says. “You can speak directly to the people who are attracted to your music.”
New York jazz critic and author Gary Giddins says Schneider’s latest CD should speak to anyone who cares about jazz. Concert in the Garden “is light years beyond her earlier ones,” he says. “When she first came on the scene, she sounded like a meditative version of Gil Evans with Thad Jones embellishments. In the last year, she’s really developed an unmistakable personality.”
And Schneider’s recent introduction of Latin and South American rhythms in her work doesn’t make her music eclectic, “as it might in a lesser talent,” Giddins says. “It has brought out more originality in her. You want to follow her development. She’s one of those musicians who gives you hope about the future of jazz.”
For Schneider, the future shouldn’t be overly orchestrated. “I went to the University knowing I was a musician but without a clear plan,” she says. “In a thousand years, I could never have envisioned that things would turn out this way. I obviously have plans for projects, but I also want life to surprise me. When I look back, I don’t want to see a straight path that took me exactly where I expected to go. I think of life as finding a balance between planning and working hard and improvisation.”
Dan Emerson is a Minneapolis freelance writer.
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