Maria Schneider plays jazz from the heartland
THE MAIN stage at the Newport Jazz Festival sits atop high scaffolding and backs up against the grey walls of Rhode Island’s 18th-century Fort Adams. From there, the performers have a lofty perspective on the white sailboats that dot the Narragansett Bay. When Maria Schneider brought her 17-piece jazz orchestra to that stage in August, the view reminded her of another elevated perch.
“I wrote this piece,” she told the audience, “after climbing to the top of a silo and looking out over the fields in southwest Minnesota where I’m from.” She was introducing the title tune from last year’s “The Thompson Fields,” which would go on to win the Grammy for best large jazz ensemble album. Wearing a long, black-lace skirt, the slender conductor turned to her band and coaxed a gentle breeze of melody. Slowly, those themes grew into blustery harmonies, the kind of muscular winds that can easily develop on the flat surfaces of a Midwestern plain.
“There’s this silo on the Thompson farm, very near to where I grew up, in Windom,” Schneider said last week by phone from her New York apartment. “There’s a metal ladder on the outside. My old friend Tony Thompson and I climbed that ladder to the top on a very windy day several years ago. We saw these huge ripples running through these dark green beans, like wave patterns moving across a sea. We could see for miles across all the houses and roads I’d known as a kid. I could see all these little parts of my life connected into a whole.”
Climbing that old ladder, she admits, was very scary. But she was glad she did it that once, for it not only gave her latest album its title, but also gave her music the personal dimension that’s so important to her. Somehow the view from the silo made her understand her roots in a new way and value them all the more.
“Being up high always does that to me,” the 55-year-old composer confessed. “Even when I’m on a plane, I feel removed from the world on the ground, and I realise what it might be like if I couldn’t be part of it,
For me, pieces of music are connected to my experiences. I don’t know if the music is inspired by something that’s going on in my unconscious or if I come up with the music separately and then it attaches itself to an experience. It’s a mystery, and that’s what scares me, because I’m always afraid it won’t happen again.
so I’m more grateful for what I have. For me, pieces of music are connected to my experiences. I don’t know if the music is inspired by something that’s going on in my unconscious or if I come up with the music separately and then it attaches itself to an experience. It’s a mystery, and that’s what scares me, because I’m always afraid it won’t happen again.”
In reality, she admits, the theme for the title tune from “The Thompson Fields” first came to her in the basement laundry room of her Manhattan apartment building. She was scheduled to fly back to Minnesota a few days later, and when she found herself overwhelmed by the view from the silo, she was struck how the theme resonated with that feeling — and how the feeling lent direction to the developing music. And when that theme crashed into a counter-theme later in the piece, it reminded her that nature is not all beauty and benevolence; it can also be destructive.
“I always use those contrasts,” she added. “You have to. If everything is somehow beautiful, the beauty loses its impact. But it’s not surprising that my writing in recent years reflects nature and rural settings. The past few years, I’ve spent a lot more time out in nature: birdwatching, hiking, kayaking . ... I always tell my students, ‘Make sure you have a life, because music doesn’t come from music; it comes from life.’”
Jazz has always been a primarily urban music, but Schneider has followed in the footsteps of such fellow smalltown Midwesterners as Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden to demonstrate that it can reflect the rural experience as well. And the jazz big band is especially effective because the many combinations made possible by 17 different instruments can conjure up the large forces she has in mind. “A large ensemble gives you the possibility of making the music large and thick,” she said.
The economic challenges of keeping a big band together in the 21st century can be quite daunting, however. Schneider was one of the first musicians to join ArtistShare, which charges a small fee for promotion and crowdfunding and allows the creators to keep ownership of their work. She is often frustrated by the mentality that all music should be free, and she was to make that point again at a recent symposium on “Artists’ Rights and the Digital Marketplace.”
A happier inspiration came her way in 2014 when David Bowie approached her about cowriting a piece. She grabbed hold of the challenge as if it were a metal ladder on the side of a silo. When they finished one song together, “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” Bowie wanted to do more, but Schneider was already committed to dates for recording “The Thompson Fields.” Instead she encouraged Bowie to collaborate with her longtime saxophonist, Donny McCaslin. McCaslin’s own combo helped Bowie finish the “Blackstar” album, which was released just two days before the singer’s unexpected death, on Jan 10.
“It was a ball to work with him in the studio,” Schneider said of Bowie. “He was the most kind, funny, easygoing person. ... I learned so much from the way he pushed the drums, the way he pushed the wild factor. Whenever I’d get worried, he’d say, ‘The plane will come down and everyone will walk away safely.’ I feel very lucky to have worked with him and very sad that he’s gone.” — Washington Bloomberg
Maria Schneider, jazz conductor