62 nd ANNUAL CRITICS POLL BIG BAND COMPOSER ARRANGER JIMMY & DENA KATZ
MARIA SCHNEIDER Orchestral Prowess BY TED PANKEN | PHOTO BY JIMMY & DENA KATZ In 2005, shortly after receiving her first Grammy for her fourth album, Concert In The Garden, Maria Schneider pinpointed the significance of the honor. “It means something more to me than my view of myself,” she said. “People in the general audience may not be exactly sure what a Pulitzer is, but they know the Grammy as the ultimate music award.” The composer, then 44, added that she had “dreamed of winning a Grammy” while growing up in Windom, Minn.—an agricultural community of 3,600 in the state’s southwest corner. “I’d say my speech at home when nobody was looking,” she said. But in her brief 2005 remarks, Schneider deviated from the “I want to thank my mother and father” script of childhood. Rather, she acknowledged the members of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, an entity since 1992, and ArtistShare, which released her self-funded Concert In The Garden. Later in 2005, Schneider would top three categories in the DownBeat Critics Poll: Jazz Album, Composer and Arranger. In the 2008 Critics Poll, with Sky Blue (ArtistShare), she topped those three categories again, along with an honor for Big Band. In this year’s poll, the Maria Schneider Orchestra was named top Big Band, and its leader once again honored as top Composer and Arranger. In 2014, Schneider spoke from the same Grammy podium to accept her Best Contemporary Classical Composition award for Winter Morning Walks, which comprises two through-composed song cycles commissioned and performed by soprano Dawn Upshaw—who also earned a Grammy (for Best Classical Vocal Solo), as did engineer Tim Martyn and producer David Frost. For the occasion, Schneider delivered eloquent denunciations of digital file-sharing and Spotify that were quoted in national media and went moderately viral. “I didn’t expect to win, but when Tim and Dawn were announced, I realized I’d better start thinking of what to say, because this could happen,” Schneider said a few months later in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I feel I’ve been given a position, and I wasn’t going to fritter away this amazing opportunity. The second I got the award, I decided I’d say this is legalized theft, which is exactly what it is. Everybody went crazy and applauded. How long are we supposed to take this?” It was time to discuss music. “I feel a little guilty,” Schneider said of her latest Grammy. “All these people push through that classical world their whole career, and I come in with this big grab. But I’ll take it.” She also expressed discomfort with DownBeat’s 2014 Best Arranger designation. “Arranging is a special art, taking a standard piece and reforming it,” she said. “It’s not the same as orchestrating.” On Winter Morning Walks, Schneider applies her orchestral prowess to frame Upshaw’s intuitively penetrating interpretations of two very different suites. On “Stories,” set to Mark Strand’s translations of five ironic, melodramatic poems by Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–’87), she provides the 34-piece St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) with intricate, sweeping scores. The title piece comprises nine poems that Nebraskan Ted Kooser, a one-time American Poet Laureate, wrote while recovering from cancer. Oswaldo Gojilov, one of several prominent contemporary composers who regard Upshaw as a muse, introduced her to Schneider with a gift of Concert In The Garden in proximity to Schneider’s first Grammy. “There aren’t many times these days where I actually fall in love with a CD,” Upshaw said by phone. “But I started to play this one over and over again in its entirety. It brought me joy at a difficult time in my personal life. Maria’s music has so much power, so unaffected and even ecstatic; it brings out the best in life. It was something new for me, and I wanted to hear it live.” Upshaw attended Schneider’s annual Thanksgiving week residency at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard, where they became acquainted. During a subsequent conversation, she began to envision a collaboration. “I thought perhaps we’d meet someplace neither of us could imagine,” Upshaw said. “I’m drawn to chiseled musical voices—music that, when I hear it, touches me, and I feel AUGUST 2014 DOWNBEAT 43
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