A rare bird

MARIA SCHNEIDER & HER ORCHESTRA

Maria Schneider and her orchestra

Two of Maria Schneider’s five Grammy Awards are for her work with rocker David Bowie and soprano Dawn Upshaw. But the Grammy she recently won for her latest album, The Thompson Fields ,is all about her 18-member jazz orchestra. The recording, which was inspired by her childhood in rural Windom, Minnesota, is Schneider’s fourth made using the fanfunded ArtistShare platform. Her 2004 album Concert in the Garden was the first recording to win a Grammy Award with internet-only sales, via ArtistShare. She has often topped annual polls in DownBeat, the jazz magazine founded in 1934. Its 82nd Readers’ Poll, announced in the Dec. 2017 issue, gave her top mention in the Big Band, Composer, and Arranger categories.

Schneider brings her orchestra to the Lensic Performing Arts Center for a concert on Friday, March 2. Performance Santa Fe also sponsors an afternoon master class with Schneider and her collective for music students from the New Mexico School for the Arts and the University of New Mexico. Coming to Santa Fe with Schneider are Steve Wilson, Dave Pietro, Rich Perry, Jon Irabagon, and Scott Robinson, reeds; Greg Gisbert, Nadje Noordhuis, Augie Haas, and Michael Rodriguez, trumpets; Tim Albright, Ryan Keberle, Marshall Gilkes, and George Flynn, trombones; Ben Monder, guitar; Gary Versace, accordion; Frank Kimbrough, piano; Jay Anderson, bass; and Kendrick Scott, drums.

The composer and bandleader traces her love for music to a Chicago pianist who moved to Windom when Schneider was five years old. Her parents invited her over one night. “Mrs. Butler played for us all after dinner, and oh my god! It was like life came into living color!” she recalled in an ArtistShare interview. Schneider studied with the woman until college and went on to earn a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music. She collaborated with composer/ arranger Gil Evans and studied with trombonist/ arranger Bob Brookmeyer before forming the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra.

Pasatiempo found her at home in New York.

Pasatiempo: It’s interesting to look back at the Grammy winners in the categories you’ve won and see previous winners Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and Gil Evans. Do you have a sort of central musical hero from the old days?

Maria Schneider: Oh boy, I have so many. Early on, when I was first listening to big-band stuff, I loved the Basie and Ellington bands. Then I discovered Gil Evans and I fell in love with all the Miles Davis music and then the Claude Thornhill band and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Then Bob Brookmeyer brought me into a whole other world. One musician I’ve always loved is Bill Evans. Every time I put on one of those records, it’s like, oh my god. It never becomes not astounding, the beauty and ingenuity of that trio. Pasa: Your references to nature are pretty unique in jazz.

Schneider: When I was in the first grade and I had just started piano — I fell in love with music immediately — and they asked me what I wanted to be, I said, an ornithologist, and my teacher said, “Would you like to tell the class what that is?” Some of my music describes birds in different ways, and also, growing up, the outdoors was such a huge part of my life. I think a lot of people get into jazz because they’re from cities and around jazz culture, but I had a very bizarre circumstance: My piano teacher in this small rural town exposed me to stride piano playing. She had been from Chicago, and she only moved to Windom from horrible circumstances of her husband and son dying, and she was transplanted to this small town to be near her daughter. So it was an odd thing that I would have that influence in that place. I really do believe that where people come from and what they’re first exposed to, those are your first impressions in life of everything, whether it’s color or sound, smells, landscape. Pasa: Your music is also about something inside you.

Schneider: That is the mystery and that’s the thing that all musicians want to find, their own voices, and you can’t from the outside decide what your voice is. It’s something that emerges over time by you being very selective about your choices in the music, that you’re really answering your own questions for what the music needs to be. And when you do that, those things in your life start to come out in the music. People say, well, how do you bring birds into your music? I can’t really explain that, exactly. Because most times I don’t sit down with the intent to write something about something. But every once in a while, as I’m writing, the music will attach itself to some experience — some memory — and all of a sudden, almost unwillingly, this thing takes over and says, I’m driving now, I’m telling you what this music is going to be about.

Pasa: Is your old neck of the woods, Cottonwood County, Minnesota, a prairie and lake country with curlews and meadowlarks and kingfishers?

Schneider: We had a place on a little lake and we’d see soras and yellow-headed blackbirds and tons of bobolinks and killdeer and meadowlarks. Oh my god, my mom would sing to a meadowlark on the wire when we were waiting for the bus, and the bird would sing back, and one day the [neighbor] Thompson boys’ mother said to my mother, “You’re going to ruin the sex life of that bird.”

Pasa: Have you converted any of your band members to birdwatching?

Schneider: Not converted, but they all are much more aware of it, and I have had musicians ask me to take them birding in Central Park — even [opera singer] Renée Fleming, which was really fun, except it was hard to move through the park because everybody was stopping her. Pasa: Do you compose at the piano?

Schneider: One piece that we will play in Santa Fe is “The Thompson Fields,” the title track from the new album, and one of the Thompson boys will be at the concert, so it’s really fun for me to say, “This music is inspired by a past that we shared, from the landscape, from the top of your silo.” That piece came to me away from the piano, the initial idea, almost like a song. But for a lot of my music, I sit at the piano, I play around searching for sounds, then my imagination kind of takes over.

Pasa: At least six of the musicians in your orchestra go back 20 or 25 years with you. That’s pretty remarkable. Schneider: Even 30 years. I was working with Rich [Perry, saxophonist] and Scott [Robinson] back before I started my band. Pasa: Then you have some young folks, like Nadje Noordhuis from Australia. Schneider: She’s a wonderful musician; she has a beautiful sound. I mean, the band is killer. It’s going to be really fun. Pasa: Ina DownBeat cover story in December 2016, you used the opportunity to talk about piracy and YouTube. Schneider: Oh, yeah, and we’re going to be playing some music related to that. [She laughs.] I’ve been writing these angry big-data pieces, and we’ll play one down there called “Data Lords.” I don’t write music

“SOME OF MY MUSIC DESCRIBES BIRDS IN DIFFERENT WAYS, AND ALSO, GROWING UP, THE OUTDOORS WAS SUCH A HUGE PART OF MY LIFE.”

to be political or to open people’s eyes, but it is fun when your own passion or interest is in the music and then someone else becomes drawn to it. Wayne Shorter told me once that Miles Davis said that he loved music that didn’t sound like music, and one of my favorite people who write about art is Robert Henri — his book The Art Spirit is one of my bibles — and he would tell his students to make a painting that doesn’t look like a painting. So to me, if your music does that, that’s a sign that it went beyond the music and carried somebody to a place. Pasa: How is ArtistShare going? Schneider: Really well. You have to be committed, because the whole thing is creating your own connection with your fans on a continual basis. I mean, if you do social media, you’re throwing all your stuff out there, you put yourself out on Facebook and you get all those “likes” — but that doesn’t have the same power as giving somebody something exclusive, knowing who they are and communicating with them. Pasa: You offer several different packages for purchasing The Thompson Fields, for example. Schneider: Exactly. It’s trying to share the whole experience behind making the record and have people feel a part of it. I committed to ArtistShare early on, and there’s no way I’d still be going otherwise. If you’ve heard about the royalties that people get from streaming, even the ones who are hugely successful, well, I know a guy who had 75 million plays and he never gets a check for more than $60 from Spotify. What’s really scary is that many of these musicians are funding their own records and going on Spotify with the hope that lots of people will hear the music but with actually no possibility of paying for that record. How long can musicians keep going in debt, paying for their own projects? ArtistShare has made it possible, and the fans that come there make it possible for me to make these records.

details

Maria Schneider Orchestra 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 2 Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St. $29-$110, discounts available; ticketssantafe.org, 505-988-1234