Prairie Jazz Companion

By Zachary Woolfe

April 12, 2013

See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com.

A few years ago the jazz composer Maria Schneider traveled back to her hometown, Windom,
Minn. She climbed a ladder with a childhood friend named Tony Thompson and found herself
at the top of a silo. She looked out over the fields: acres of Thompson’s bean plants moving
over and past one another in the breeze. Windom, population 4,646, is the seat of Cottonwood
County, near the state’s southwest corner. The Des Moines River flows leisurely through it.
The land is smooth prairie, in all directions. “The mistake people make,” Schneider told me
about this flat place she came from, “is thinking that it’s flat.”

When Schneider looks at Windom, she sees not endless plains but an infinity of barely
noticeable hills and tiny ponds, slight inclines in the topography, little nuances in the
landscape. She sees layers. “I thought about the stories, the intersecting stories, and the lives,
the generations,” she recalled about that moment gazing over Tony Thompson’s bean plants. “I
think I was having feelings about our parents.”

The melody of what eventually became “The Thompson Fields” rises through six notes in a
gentle zigzag and then lands, safe and warm, on the solid emotional ground of an F-sharp
chord. It’s a heartland lullaby, as simple and lovely as Pachelbel’s Canon. But then things get
more complex. Schneider didn’t just want to make the soundtrack to an idyllic country vista.
She wanted to hear the movement of the plants and the darker, stronger feelings underneath:
the beans overlapping in the wind, the generations of Schneiders and Thompsons on the land.

So she asked her longtime pianist, Frank Kimbrough, to improvise not in relation to the rest of
the band, as jazz instrumentalists are trained to do, but completely independently of it. The
band plays a series of low B chords, and then Kimbrough enters in a mood that has nothing to
do with the key of B. He keeps playing over the others: the band as one layer and the piano as
another, with no relationship other than their presence in the same space and time.

On a freezing night in February, Schneider and her band played “The Thompson Fields” in
Elmhurst, Ill., a sleepy Chicago suburb. Though Schneider has won two Grammys and may be
the most prominent woman in jazz — even, as the writer Devin Leonard has called her, “the
most important composer in the jazz world” of any sex — she often ends up in out-of-the-way
places. She plays small towns like Elmhurst and small, jazz-hungry European cities like
Tromso, Norway, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, or Bielsko-Biala in Poland, where she
discovered a young pianist she says is one of the most remarkable she’s ever heard. She and
her band, which has remained remarkably close to intact over its two decades, had come to
Illinois as the prime-time Saturday-night attraction at Elmhurst College’s annual jazz festival,
which brings hundreds of high-school and college students together for a long weekend of
competitions and showcases. The school’s modest chapel was full and boisterous for
Schneider’s set.

Schneider, one of the few big-band leaders who only conducts and doesn’t play, led with gentle
motions and slight, dancing bends at the knee. When solos began, she backed modestly to the
side of the stage. The band eventually got to the strange, bitonal part of “The Thompson
Fields.” The result was sumptuous cacophony, like two records playing at once.

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After the performance, a long line of students waited to greet the musicians and pose for
photos. A girl with a nose piercing stood in front of Schneider, crying so hard she could barely
speak.

“I grew up on a farm,” she finally choked out, “and with every note I could see my farm.”

For a long time, big-band jazz relied on a swinging but implacable wall of brass: the sound of
Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Schneider absorbed what she calls that
“frontal load of decibels and power and energy,” and she has never abandoned it completely.
But the music she began composing when she moved to New York in the late 1980s took on a
different character.

“I got tired of the big band being these three primary colors: the trumpets, the trombones, the
saxes,” she said. Schneider wanted the muscle and precision you get with 15 or 20 loud
instruments, and she wanted the backbone of improvisation that is fundamental to jazz. But
she was also drawn to the colors of the orchestra: shifting, ethereal prisms out of Ravel and
Debussy. “The Thompson Fields” was composed in a broad arc, rather than in the choppier
style of big-band jazz.

“My pieces, many of them, at least the newer things, are through-composed like classical
music,” she said. “They go through different sections, so the soloist has to bring the piece from
here to there. It’s not ʻThis is my solo, I’m going to show you everything I know about the
instrument,’ which most big-band music is: kind of an ego show for each soloist. In mine they
have to carry the piece and tell the story.”

In a way, Schneider has been trying to reconcile invention and rigor since childhood. Her first
piano teacher happened to be a raucous stride pianist who exposed Schneider to the virtuosity
of Art Tatum, along with the expected Chopin études. Though Schneider studied classical
composition at the University of Minnesota, she turned increasingly back to jazz.
After graduate work at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, she moved to New York and
began working as a copyist, churning out instrumental parts from orchestral scores. It was
through a copying gig that she met and started working as an assistant to Gil Evans, who was
Miles Davis’s arranger of choice in the glory days of “Birth of the Cool” and “Sketches of
Spain.” Evans was a revelation. He would regularly bring in instruments that weren’t part of
the big-band palette — French horns, flutes, oboes — and his writing willfully stretched the
abilities of his players.

“Gil wanted me to reorchestrate one of his pieces for big band,” Schneider recalled. “I was in
my 20s and feeling completely out of my league. And one day I came in with what I wrote, and
he was horrified. He said: ʻNo, no, no. I want these low instruments at the top of their range so
they’re uncomfortable. And these high instruments at the bottom of their range.’ He wanted
people playing completely at their opposite range at struggling points in the music. And then it
was just, Oh, my God, that’s the stuff you can’t learn. That’s the stuff that comes from a
personality searching for his own inner world.”

At night, she composed her own music for a band she started with the trombonist John
Fedchock, a classmate at Eastman. (She married Fedchock too, but both the marriage and
that first band dissolved after a few years.) Following the lead of Evans, she tweaked her band
to include various winds. She also played with orchestration, so that a fluegelhorn might share
a melody line with a trombone and a bass flute, making an alluring blend of brassy and
smooth. “I started mixing people, mixing the colors,” she said, “so when you listen to it, it
might sound like a French horn — and there’s no French horn in the band.”

Back in the early 1990s, Schneider’s band played a weekly residency at a club in Greenwich
Village. Every Monday for five years, she loaded all the music stands and the scores into a cab
and packed them up again at the end of the night for the ride back to her one-bedroom
apartment on the Upper West Side. The members of the band each got $25; she would pay
herself $15. “Every week it was a logistical hell,” she said. “I don’t know how I had the energy
for that. You’re different when you’re younger. You just take it somehow.”
 Maria Schneider and her orchestra at sound check in Elmhurst, Ill.
Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

She worked for years to flesh out the orchestral elements in her style of jazz, through her
debut, “Evanescence” (1994), a combination of brassiness and lightness; “Allegresse” (2000),
with its Brazilian accents; and her 2004 masterpiece, “Concert in the Garden,” whose pieces
have the sweep and drama of tone poems. But what she had not done until recently was write
for an actual orchestra, with its full complement of strings and its lack of improvisation. It was
not long after “Concert in the Garden” that she met the soprano Dawn Upshaw, who came to
prominence singing Mozart at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1980s and emerged as a bold
advocate for contemporary music. Upshaw had gotten in the habit of attending Schneider’s
band’s annual Thanksgiving-week performances at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan.

“It was about the third year that I was there when I thought to myself, Wow, I wonder if she
would ever consider writing anything for me.” Upshaw said. “I know that our worlds don’t
collide typically, but what would happen if we tried to do something together?” Schneider had
never incorporated lyrics before, and Upshaw sensed she was anxious. “But she was game,”
she added. “And it’s one of the best musical experiences that I’ve ever had.”

The relaxed, seductive “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,” which Upshaw sang with the
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2008, was the first product of the collaboration. Three years
later there was “Winter Morning Walks,” settings of the poetry of Ted Kooser. This was a more
daring combination, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing the score as written, as
members of her band improvised.

Schneider’s new album combines the two song cycles. If it seems like an unusual bet for a
record label to take — even with renowned figures like Schneider and Upshaw, this is, after all,
an idiosyncratic amalgam of jazz, contemporary classical music and poetry, requiring studio
time for two separate orchestras — that’s because the album, like her previous two, was never
released by a record company. “Concert in the Garden,” “Sky Blue” (2007) and now “Winter
Morning Walks” were financed entirely by her fans.

A little more than a decade ago, after Schneider released “Allegresse,” she realized that her
arrangement with the boutique German label Enja Records, which had taken a chance on
“Evanescence” when no one else would, was actually costing her money. Making albums the
way Schneider wanted was expensive. She found herself paying a third of the recording
budget and getting nothing back. “Allegresse” got great reviews, but Schneider didn’t have the
money to even consider another project.

Around the same time, a musician friend named Brian Camelio (who did work as a computer
programmer) was coming up with the idea for ArtistShare, a crowdfunding scheme that
predated Kickstarter by years. Camelio’s idea was to offer fans something that couldn’t be
pirated: an intimate perspective on an artist’s creative process in exchange for financial
support. He lived down the street from Schneider on the Upper West Side and went over to her
apartment one day in the spring of 2003 to show her the math. “I put pencil to paper,” he
recalled. “If we get X amount of people to contribute X amount of money, we could do it.”
Camelio would take a 15 percent cut of the gross revenue; Schneider would get the rest. Even
if an album released through ArtistShare sold fewer copies than one released by a prestigious
label like Blue Note, her take-home would be substantially greater.

It has worked remarkably well for Schneider, paying for her past three records and earning
her, for “Concert in the Garden,” the first Grammy ever awarded to an album available only
over the Internet. But the cost of making “Winter Morning Walks” is still not entirely
recouped; recording two orchestras is an expensive proposition. “By the time I pay the
publicist and everything, this new one is around $200,000,” Schneider said. “It’s a lot of money.
It’s just really expensive. I’ve got a ways to go on this.”

And the ArtistShare model cuts two ways. Schneider’s fans, for the first time, have a say in her
music at an early stage, and some have disapproved of her recent orchestral collaborations. “I
got a couple of e-mails from people that said, ʻDon’t write to me again unless you did
something with your big band,’ ” she said. “I guess there are some people who just don’t want
to see me do something they’re not used to.”

ArtistShare has also made communicating with her backers a new obligation. Over the past 10
years, Schneider has become a tireless producer of behind-the-scenes content to share; in one
video clip she scrubs her toilet to demonstrate how appealing domestic tasks become when
you’re procrastinating. At first she resisted publicly exposing her highs and, especially, lows. “I
said, ʻMaria, that’s part of the story,’ ” Camelio said. “From very early on, she’s been willing to
be honest with her fans, to be honest about her struggles.”

But it hasn’t always been pretty. Schneider is prone to insecurity and can get deeply unhappy
when she’s working. It’s not unusual for her to break down in tears in the studio or in front of
the band when she’s frustrated with herself. “It’s not easy to share your creative process when
you’re having four weeks of writer’s block,” she said. When she was working on the title piece
for “Concert in the Garden,” she posted a video in which she was particularly morose about
her progress. Her father watched it and berated her: “Who’s gonna want to buy this album if
you’re telling them it’s crap?”

Schneider still lives in the same cozy one-bedroom on the Upper West Side that she hauled
music stands to and from all those years ago. The place just barely fits an old upright piano,
which for a long time was the only major purchase she ever made. The walls are decorated
with her sister Kate’s paintings of vampiric rabbits and melting globes, factories and fields
that recall the flax-processing plant next door to her childhood home and the open spaces of
Windom. The sinister, almost apocalyptic images fit her current situation: for months workers
have been jackhammering in the garden of the building facing her windows. The noise from
the construction is surreal, and the project shows no sign of ending. It is hard to imagine how
Schneider will be able to compose there once the long process of releasing and promoting
“Winter Morning Walks” is over and she turns her attention back to writing new music for the
band. Most weekends she escapes with her boyfriend, Mark Righter, a lawyer for New York
University and a jazz aficionado who knew Schneider’s music long before he knew her, to a
house in the Catskills, where she can finally compose on a grand piano looking out at the trees.

It’s a bucolic scene up in the mountains, seemingly an even better fit for Schneider than the
city. She is preoccupied with the destruction of the environment, and birds are her passion. She
sits on the advisory board of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and claims, half-jokingly, to care
more about it than music. “I mean, the planet is so amazing,” she said as we watched a video
clip of herons hatching. “You see some of this stuff and you think, It doesn’t even matter if the
humans survive, as long as this does.”

Though Schneider’s ArtistShare fans have seen her frustrated, this pessimism seems not to
have entered her music. Much of her appeal is the joy and exhilaration in her records, which is
presumed to be a direct reflection of a joyful, exhilarating life. “Hang Gliding,” after all, is
about hang-gliding in Brazil. “The Thompson Fields” is about the Thompson fields. “The
ʻPretty’ Road” was inspired by childhood drives home from the Driftwood Steakhouse near
Windom with her dad. “Like dreams are a way to process your psyche,” she said, “music is a
way to preserve and share memory.”

The energy of Schneider’s music comes from the tension between this impulse to turn things
beautiful and the more disturbing stuff, even the pain, that remains. “Bulería, Soleá y Rumba,”
perhaps her finest piece, was a commission from Jazz at Lincoln Center that she managed to
write just after being given a diagnosis of breast cancer. (That was in early 2003; the cancer
was caught early, and she reports that it is in remission.)

The suave opening leads to an ecstatic and melancholy sax solo that eventually yields,
exhausted, to wordless vocalizing and a serene rumba beat that vanishes into the same quiet
rhythm with which the piece began. In 18 minutes, it sums up a life of anxieties and
frustrations that nevertheless ends with a final impression of peace.
“My world is about making things nice,” Schneider told me. “It’s just who I am.” But if her
heartland jazz is a pastoral, it’s as complicated as growing up in Windom was. She told me with
an earnest smile about how her mother took to treating injured birds when Schneider and her
sisters were little. She once healed a baby goose with a broken wing, and it became almost a
member of the family. There was no fairy-tale ending, though. The family took in a gander as a
mate for the goose, but it pecked the goose to death.

“Walking by Flashlight,” from the album “Winter Morning Walks,” composed by Maria Schneider, poem by Ted Kooser,
with Dawn Upshaw (singer), Jay Anderson (bass), Frank Kimbrough (piano), Scott Robinson (alto clarinet and bass
clarinet) and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Zachary Woolfe writes frequently about music for The New York Times.

Editor: Wm. Ferguson

A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2013, on Page 20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Prairie Jazz Companion

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