Clipped to the music desk of Maria Schneider’s upright piano, when I visited her, was a picture of the ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Spread out all over it were sketches for a new composition, “Cerulean Skies.” It was an assignment for an event she was both looking forward to and dreading: a festival in Vienna programmed by the theater director Peter Sellars, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.
It is a piece about the migration of birds, and Schneider had 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 apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Schneider—forty-five when I listened with her—composes at the piano; onstage she stands and conducts her band, which ranges from seventeen to twenty musicians. 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 seventeen-piece band more or less intact for more than a decade. But she has managed it, since 1994, through grants and ambitious touring and, in more recent years, 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.
That natural flowing sound in her music is not easily come by. “If you had talked to me last Friday”—we met on a Monday afternoon—“I would have burst into tears,” she said. “It’s so much work, I can’t even tell you.” She ran off a list of gigs she had coming up, on three different continents. “Everybody’s a freelance musician, and for some reason, the stars didn’t align this time. So I’m having some really brand-new people coming in—two that I’ve never even met. That means I have to rehearse all these different groups.” Her voice was losing its composure.
Both the open-air sound of Schneider’s music and its sense of hope and possibility make sense laid against the details of her life. She 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, “and you’d look out the window and you’d see nothin’.” She smiled. 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 or moves her limbs when she needs to express something. “When your entertainment isn’t provided for you,” she continued, “your life is full of fantasy.”
As a girl, 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,” she explained, “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 his daughter 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 ninety-degree angle. “The earth looks perpendicular to the wing, and I used to look at the earth and think that we were straight. I didn’t think we were tilted.”
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 and transcribing. 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. Her work has been frequently compared to his, which, she says, only suggests that his music isn’t understood well enough. But it is an almost inescapable conclusion: Evans is her precedent, the impressionism-influenced jazz composer who recused himself as a pianist from some of his greatest work, created his own sound colors, and did not make typical “big band” jazz.
She put on “Concierto de Aranjuez,” from Sketches of Spain, one of Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis. She had conducted it with her own band several times since Evans’s death. 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, while the castanets trail on five more seconds after his entrance. (“The castanets shoulda quit sooner.” She frowned. “That’s how it was written.”) It’s an amazing piece of writing. Suddenly, a quiet forms around Davis, but not an empty one; the music around him goes into slow motion, and its colors seem to change.
“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, with a curious momentum; they’re not just notes but crossing trajectories, new instruments floating to the top of the arrangement. “What blows me away about Gil is the lines,” she said. “There’s always a line moving. He’s so much like Ravel; everything’s always moving. He can do these incredibly slow tempos, and there’s a feeling of motion even in a slow tempo. There’s always an expectation of a line moving.”
But it must have made a big difference when he was conducting, I said. Wasn’t it crucial that he himself made things more taut, made some lines trickle a little longer or shorter? He was a composer and conductor working with improvisers; he must have made changes on the spot. “Not necessarily,” she said. “The lines are there. The bass and tuba are playing a melody, always. The bass is never relegated to just bass notes. It’s all there; it’s very tightly composed.”
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 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 changes her subsequent writing. It has taken some time for this looping to work. I confess I used to have problems with her early music, finding it too pretty and a little rhythmically square. But later, once the band grew into itself, rhythm took over the music, and her writing became simpler and more mystical.
“I had a friend,” she said, “who once asked Frank Foster, of the Basie band, ‘How did you guys learn to phrase that way?’ He said, ‘I never thought about it.’ I realized, that’s how it happens: those particular people playing that music found that thing, and before you knew it, it was the ‘Basie sound.’ How did it happen? Nobody can really say how. It was through incremental shifts in feel, from night to night.”
Her band evolved in a similar way, she figured. “It developed its own organic way of phrasing, which was the result of these particular people playing this particular music. And then, as a result of my hearing that phrasing, I start writing to that. They show me what’s possible.”
A similarly trusting approach applies to her method of making records. With a movie camera, or a digital audio recorder, Schneider documents each stage of a new piece of music, including recording sessions, even problematic ones. Then anyone can stream all that documentation from her Web site, mariaschneider.com, or from her page at ArtistShare’s site.
This is quite an act of transparency for someone who comes across as anxious about the creative process, even compulsively disappointed in her own music; talking to her, you understand that art is about half agony. But the system seems to have worked. Concert in the Garden, her first record with ArtistShare and also her first to use this artist-peeping technology, won a Grammy in 2005; sixteen months after our 2006 conversation, so did “Cerulean Skies,” the bird-migration piece, in the 2007 awards. She believes that above all else the process proves that a good piece can result from unpromising beginnings.
So it’s good for your attitude, I said.
“And it’s good for others,” she said, usefully. “For the world to pretend that art is so damn easy and logical—I just do this and this and it’s fine—well, that’s not the way it is,” she chided. “I’ve given clinics before where I talk about my process and I say, ‘I’m writing this piece now and it’s so hard, and I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And I’ve had kids come to me, crying, ‘I’m so relieved to hear you say that!’ Everybody feels so much pressure.”
A curious fact of Schneider’s working life is that she writes music of the solitary imagination yet has become a symbol of the jazz education movement, which tends to encourage teaching by imitation. In any case, clinics for young musicians regularly pop up on Schneider’s schedule. Her career was started, she reckoned, by a commission she was awarded in 1990 by the International Association of Jazz Educators. Not long after that, her band was playing Monday nights at Visiones, the now-defunct New York City jazz club. The gigs led to more commissions, with European radio or-chestras, the bread-and-butter of large-ensemble jazz composers. Thus could she quit her day job.
Given her own résumé, she has thought a lot about what jazz education can do for young musicians, and what it can’t. “Some people think jazz education’s a bad thing,” she said. “The only bad thing is when jazz education leads the person before they’ve explored something themselves. I had to do a lot of exploring and floundering without a lot of help. When I left Eastman, I was very frustrated, feeling like I wanted to find my own voice. And I was a little bit paint-by-numbers. But in retrospect I look back and I see hints of who I would become.”
You have to reject a lot before you have something lasting, I suggested. “Bob Brookmeyer helped me with this,” she said, nodding. “He’d ask me questions like, ‘Why is there a solo now?’ I’d say, ‘Because it’s a jazz piece, because I wrote the first part of the tune, and now there’s a little send-off.’ He’d say, ‘There should never be a solo until the only thing that can happen is a solo.’ I never knew what that meant, but what I started to realize was that I had this template branded into my head of bass line, chord, comping, melody, tune, send-offs, like you were buying a modular unit, and you could change certain aspects of it, but they were going to go together something like this. I mean, you could move it to a different key, change the orchestration, but . . .
“Then I started questioning these modular units. There doesn’t have to be anything. There are no modular units. It’s music, it’s ideas, it’s sound, it’s vibration,” she concluded.
I asked if her students were troubled by the open-endedness that she espouses.
“It’s very daunting. If anything’s possible, where do you begin? You want to give them limitations so that they can produce something. When you can suddenly do everything, what do you do? We live in eclectic times; we can do anything. I mean, I’m sorry, but when Mozart was writing, it was sonata form, baby.”
Even thirty years ago, there didn’t seem to be so many options. “Exactly. It’s rough. So, that’s where you have to find your own geometry, your own world,” she said. “Look at Elliott Carter. He writes intensely complex music. But he has his own logic, his own technique. It’s a world of math that resonates with him. I believe that for him it’s intuitive. But trying to make me write a twelve-tone piece is like trying to ask me to write a beautiful piece in Portuguese. Everybody has to find their own language.”
During the 1980s, the Adagio movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major fell on Schneider like a cash register from the sky. The piece overwhelmed her senses; she had to force herself to stop listening to it. She still thinks it is “the most gorgeous piece of music on the planet,” and would like it played at her funeral. She feels it so deeply that her reactions to Martha Argerich playing it, with the Berlin Philharmonic, were much more physical than cerebral.
As the slow, lovely opening unfolded in its three-beat rhythm, she made low, murmuring noises. “Mmm. The harmony.” The piano played a short trill, and the flutes entered. She closed her eyes. “It’s just like a breeze.” The strings drifted in. Then, almost four minutes in, a gently dissonant four-note piano figure changes the temperature of the music. “I mean, talk about blues notes, but used in a new way. Unh! Uhhh! It’s such angularity, but such beauty. It kills me. Have you ever seen the Jerome Robbins choreography to this?”
The dissonant piano line emerged again. “That is so unbelievable. It’s like a seventh over the third, and then a sharp-nine, I think. It’s basically blues.” The orchestra came to a consonant rest. Suddenly agitated, Schneider got up out of her chair. “And in this part, Kyra Nichols, when she dances in the New York City Ballet, she has this little skirt, and she starts doing, you know, pas de bourrée around the stage, and then she’s just dancing around as if the wind is blowing and it’s just like UNNNH! It’s to die.”
We listened to the end, through all the symmetrical rising and falling in the piece. “It has this sense of motion, the timing of motion,” she said. She appeared to be searching for new words, then decided these really were the apt ones. “When that piece begins, it just breathes. It leaves you feeling just settled. And then there are these little tensions in it that just make you squeeze one muscle a little bit. The harmony starts to move, and things start to drop out, and it creates this incredible momentum. By the end, when the strings are coming in, it’s just . . . there’s so much motion.”
But Schneider was also caught up in how the moving pieces interacted and developed. “He creates a sense of motion with harmony, the slightest tension between the melody and the harmony, and it’s like, if you bring two elements and they push apart—that creates motion,” she explained. “If things are too settled all the time and too consonant all the time, it leaves you rested. So he just slowly plays on the tension. Just like in life, sometimes, boy, time goes by really fast, and it’s just a ride. And sometimes, every minute is just excruciating because you’re being forced through issues. He has this way of forcing you slightly through little issues.
“And then,” she added, “it’s just so beautiful. It feels so pure and kinda naive at the same time. It just feels totally honest, in the way that Portela feels honest.”
The turnaround moment for her band was the 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 explained, 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. Typical of its kind, the song has a bright, huge melody; a trombone plays over the mandolinlike cavaquinho and the tambourinelike pandeiros; a male voice (Armando Santos’s) sings the verses scratchily, a thunder of voices joining in on the chorus.
During her first visit to Rio, she explained, the composer Paolo Moura took her to a rehearsal at the samba school he belongs to, Imperatriz Leopoldinense. Samba-school rehearsals are like organized parties, held in warehouses, at the edge of favela neighborhoods; there are hundreds of percussion instruments playing together. (Once I visited a rehearsal of Mangueira, another Rio samba school; it was the loudest and most provocative sound I had ever heard.) It suggested to Schneider some new ideas about music’s functions.
“What I love in Brazilian music,” 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 that, 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 from Rio, 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 cajón, 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 farther 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?”), Schneider cocked a finger.
“Now check this out,” she said. “Modulation, up a minor third. 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 arrangements were by Marty Paich, a West Coast jazz arranger and a contemporary of Evans.)
She seemed self-conscious about praising an AM radio tune from her childhood in terms that should be reserved for Major Works of Art. But she raved: “Jimmy Webb is a genius. 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 said, referring to the John Coltrane composition, of which she wrote her own revised arrangement. “I mean, ‘Giant Steps’ is just moving by major thirds; what’s the difference?”
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.”
She thought about it.
“But also there’s the bird thing,” she added. “We had birds, we had a pet goose, we had crows. My mother used to set the wings of birds and stuff. We had a house full of animals.
“The goose never learned to fly, but the goose used to fly with my dad, in the plane. The crows were free, but unfortunately, when they were little, before they were imprinted, they fell out of a nest. So they were free to fly all over town, but eventually the police made us lock them up because they were a public disturbance.”
How? I said. By pecking?
“They’d sit on the telephone wires, and the dogs would bark at them. They learned to bark, so they’d bark back. And then, in the winter, the crow cage, which was huge, was kept down at the plant, and the night watchman taught them to say ‘go to hell.’ So these birds would come out in the spring and say ‘go to hell.’ My childhood was surreal.”
Set List
Miles Davis with Gil Evans, “Concierto de Aranjuez,” from Sketches of Spain (Columbia), recorded 1959.
Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G Major, Martha Argerich with the Berlin Philharmonic, from Prokofiev, Ravel: Piano Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon), recorded 1967.
Velha Guarda da Portela, “A Maldade Não Tem Fim,” from Portela Passado Na Gloria (RGE), recorded 2002.
Fifth Dimension, “Up, Up and Away,” from Greatest Hits on Earth (Arista), recorded 1972.