From the embers of financial and emotional hardship, jazz composer Maria Schneider has produced an album of startling innovation and beauty, writes Ray Comiskey.
It doesn't always pay to be one of the best around. When Maria Schneider released her first album, Evanescence, 10 years ago, it was clear that jazz had found a composer and orchestrator of enormous potential. Her subsequent albums, Coming About, Allégresse and now the just issued and critically acclaimed Concert In The Garden, confirm that promise.
But not generally known at the time she did Evanescence was that she paid for it herself, with $30,000 saved working as a music copyist in New York. Although she had been associated professionally with Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, two of the idiom's greatest composers, there wasn't much interest in the recording. Finally, she sold it to a record company for $10,000. Another $7,000 or so trickled in subsequently from royalties and mechanicals. And that was that.
Yet it sold around 20,000 CDs, a respectable figure for a jazz release, especially by a previously unknown artist. But with the record company, distributors and record shops entering the equation, Schneider found herself at the bottom of the food chain, like most musicians. And Allégresse, which came out in 2000, cost even more and left her with virtually no return on her investment. Small wonder that it's taken four years for her to dip her toe in financial hot water again. "I started to realise I was in the business of gift-giving," she says ruefully.
This time, however, it's different. She has released Concert In The Garden herself on the Internet, as a CD and as a downloadable album with artwork. In what could be a pointer for other musicians, it's part of a participatory package of services relating to the album and its making, including copies of her scores, that can be accessed through her website. And in the eight weeks or so since Concert In The Garden came on the market, it's already recovered in the neighbourhood of $50,000 of the $90,000 it cost to make.
That's a respectable neighbourhood. And using the Internet like this makes it more environmentally friendly for artists than the gift-giving she spoke about.
It helps, she acknowledges, that, in breaking new ground,Schneider is an internationally renowned figure, with numerous honours: four Grammy nominations to her credit and regular placing in the annual polls of Down Beat, America's leading jazz magazine.
But it also matters that the album is every bit as remarkable as the critical hosannahs have suggested. The past four years haven't been spent just licking financial wounds and being paralysed by self-pity.
Nor is this what you would associate with her. In person she's warm, friendly, direct, open and unpompous, the antithesis of the misunderstood, put-upon artist starving in a garret. And her music, for all its veiled complexity and scrupulously wrought development, is full of sensuality, moving, beautiful and life-affirming.
Aside from the translucent quality of the writing on the new album, which includes lovely use of the voice of Luciana Souza, she has been well served by the musicians who played on it.
Schneider's pieces are long-form, through-composed works; they're not simply theme-variations-theme formats - even those closest to that procedure on the album, Choro Dançado and Dança Ilusória, tend rather to go their own sweet way. But drop an improvising soloist into the mix and the flavour and shape can be compromised.
It doesn't happen here. Fitting improvising soloists seamlessly into her pieces is something Schneider has consciously sought in the past, though perhaps never achieved as thoroughly as she has here. Most, if not all, of them have worked for her in the past. "I think over the years we've gotten to know each other. They've gotten to know what I like in my music and I've slowly been learning to write for them, too," she says.
IT'S NOTICEABLE, TOO, that many of her compositions are connected with dance and movement in one form or another. She agrees.
"All my pieces, even if they aren't directly inspired by movement, the way I write them is that I sit at the piano and I work and I write, but I also dance. I will record myself playing into a tape recorder and then I put headphones on and listen to it and I start dancing around my apartment. My body tells me what's working and what's not working, so even if the pieces aren't directly inspired by movement, they're all constructed by me envisioning them with movement.
"In most cultures music isn't separate from dance," she adds. "Samba is kind of synonymous with dance. If you think about flamenco music, it encompasses dance. And when I was a kid I took dance lessons, and I used to do ballet and tap dance, and I was a figure skater. So for me it's all together. To me, if I can't move to music I feel constricted."
Apart from the title piece on Concert In The Garden, which was inspired by memories of a small lake near her family home in Minnesota and watching the profusion of birds around its shores, the rest of the album's compositions directly evoke dance. The long, superbly developed Bulería, Soleá y Rumba uses flamenco forms; Choro Dançado is derived from Brazilian choro, an early, light, contrapuntal music (oddly enough, not for dancing); Pas de Deux was inspired by the ballerina, Sylvie Guillem; and Dança Ilusória by childhood memories of watching old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals and fantasising - "stone-faced", she says in the sleeve notes - that she was their dancing partner.
Stone-faced? She gives a slightly embarrassed laugh at the recollection. "I was this little redhead kid, freckled, you know and I was kind of - I was a little bit geeky-looking and I was one of those slow developers, so I never really felt like a woman and I could never imagine myself looking like a woman. And to be honest, I'm 43 years old now and I still look like a girl. I always say I'm going to go from looking like a girl to being an old woman, but there's no woman in between, somehow.
"So when I was a child I would fantasise that I was (a dancer like) Cyd Charisse, or Debbie Reynolds with Gene Kelly, and it was just so absolutely ridiculous that I thought that, if anybody even caught me fantasising about that, they would just laugh me out of the house." Nobody would be tempted to laugh now.
Other things move her, too. She recalls visiting the Picasso museum in Malaga last year and bursting into tears in the first room. A Miró retrospective in New York a few years ago had a similar effect on her.
"And music inspires me - that's the kind of music that comes deeply out of a culture," she adds, "like flamenco. It's music that touches the bottom of the well. It's almost like it's a valve for intense emotion. Blues is that, and a lot of Brazilian music has that quality, too. It's just speaking so deeply of life.
"And when I feel that in dance or in music, or if I feel that in somebody's painting, it touches the spot; it's the same spot that I go to when I'm composing. And it feels to me like, when I experience that with somebody else's work, or in my own work, that I touch that spot that's eternal, you know; the place that connects us all, the place that never goes away, the place that we are when time goes and we're gone."
WHAT SHE SAYS has a particular resonance for her album's finest piece, Bulería, Soleá y Rumba, which was commissioned by Jazz At Lincoln Center and premièred there in January last year. In her sleeve notes she said she wrote it at a difficult time in her life and, in writing it, finally came to realise she really was a musician. Could she elaborate? "I got very sick at that time," she explains, "and I was really scared, so scared that I could barely function. Friends tried to help and support me and talk to me, but I found that the only thing that could kind of save me emotionally was sitting down and writing, because I had to go to that place almost as a lifeline, the only place I could go where I felt calm.
"And that's where I kind of came to this realisation that that inner place is sort of eternal. That's the place that when I went there I felt would never go away, because it felt like this sort of all-encompassing place. And out of that place music came. And I just hung on to writing. I couldn't wait to write every day and I didn't want to stop. With this it was 'forget about the commission. I need to do this piece, because if I'm not concentrating on this piece I'm going to freak out from panic'.
"So the piece just kind of saved me. And then in the end my health recovered and I'm doing fine. But the big lesson that came from that experience was that music is just the deepest and the most incredible gift in my life, that this is the thing that helps me touch really myself.
"And I realised that this is why I'm a musician. Not because my brain can write and that I've studied music my whole life, but that music is a channel for me to get to that very centred place.
She pauses. "It's hard to talk about these things," she says. "It's hard to put it into words. But it was a very profound experience." So is the piece that came out of it.