Though women increasingly have been acquiring clout in the male-dominated world of jazz, at least one wing of the business has remained almost exclusively a boys’ club: the big band.
Granted, women have crooned for the large dance bands since at least the ’20s, and, more recently, women have broken into the instrumental ranks as well.
But when it comes to the two principal positions–writing the scores and leading the band–men still hold a near monopoly on the big jobs. Thus Wynton Marsalis heads the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Jon Faddis the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band in New York, Gunther Schuller and David Baker co-direct the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and William Russo runs the Chicago Jazz Ensemble of Columbia College Chicago.
And that makes the ascent of Maria Schneider all the more striking. At 35, an age when jazz musicians typically are just beginning to establish themselves, Schneider has emerged as the most impressive new bandleader-composer to take the podium in years.
If you doubt it, check out either “Evanescence” (on the Enja label), Schneider’s brilliant record debut of 1994, or “Coming About” (Enja), her daring follow-up record, to be released Tuesday. Though Schneider was virtually unknown when she recorded “Evanescence” (paying recording costs out of her own pocket), the disc won her two Grammy nominations, and it’s a good bet that its sequel will be in the Grammy running next year.
That Schneider already has toured Europe twice this year and makes her JVC Jazz Festival debut later this month in New York attests to her growing reputation.
So how did a jazz pianist from tiny Windom, Minn., help shatter the big-band gender barrier?
“I actually didn’t have that much of a problem being a woman in jazz–all along the way people have treated me with respect,” says Schneider, speaking from her Manhattan apartment.
“I think it may be harder for horn players and other instrumentalists; I often hear women talking about the problems they’ve had dealing with male musicians and male egos, but as bandleader and writer, I just didn’t come across that.
“Maybe it’s because my first mentor was a woman, and we never even discussed the fact that we weren’t men. It was not an issue.”
More than playing scales
Indeed, it was Schneider’s feisty first teacher, a little-known jazz pianist from Chicago named Evelyn Butler, who set the young musician in motion.
Having moved to Windom when Schneider was 5 years old, the newly widowed Butler turned up at the family home one evening for a dinner party. When Butler sat down at the keyboard and let loose with great bursts of stride-style piano playing, the young Schneider was knocked off her feet.
“There was such an explosion of sound, it was a real mind-blow,” remembers Schneider, whose teacher died a couple of years ago. “She had one of those big personalities that come out through music, and the energy of it attracted me immediately.
“So I begged my parents for piano lessons, and (Butler) turned out to be phenomenal, teaching me music theory as well as piano. So right from the beginning I became acutely aware that music isn’t just dots on the page but that somebody is composing it, creating the structure and design of it.”
By the time Schneider enrolled at the University of Minnesota as a theory and composition major in 1979, she was devouring records of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and other jazz revolutionaries of the ’60s. And when Toshiko Akiyoshi came to Minneapolis to lead her big band in an Orchestra Hall concert, Schneider’s fate was sealed.
“Here was this woman leading a huge band, working, going on the road, doing it all,” recalls Schneider. “And when I saw that, it all suddenly clicked.”
A promising student
Schneider enrolled in the graduate school at the University of Miami, a cauldron of big-band experimentation where her own musical style began to flower.
“Even back then Maria was writing great tunes,” remembers Jim Trompeter, a noted Chicago musician who was a Schneider classmate in Miami. “She already had a very advanced harmonic sense and the imagination to come up with unusual instrumentation, and she was constantly at the piano writing.”
Little wonder, then, that not long after receiving a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., Schneider caught the attention of the finest writer-arrangers in the business. Bob Brookmeyer, a trombonist and jazz visionary by any measure, took on Schneider as a composition student, and Gil Evans (who had orchestrated such classical Miles Davis recordings as “Sketches of Spain” and “Porgy and Bess”) hired her as assistant.
“Bob really helped me with learning how to develop musical ideas and getting away from the old theme-and-variations cliches,” remembers Schneider.
“Gil wasn’t one to talk much about technique, but from his music I learned about (orchestral) transparency, color, about the way music can grab you inside.”
Though “everyone laughed at me for wanting to start a band of my own,” says Schneider, the ensemble she has been leading Monday nights for the past three years at Visiones, a Greenwich Village club, put her on the map. She may have had to bankroll her own first recording with the ensemble and wait a year until the Enja label decided to release it, but “Evanescence” became an instant critical hit.
Down Beat called the record “a sharp, accomplished debut with memorable writing,” while the Los Angeles Times dubbed it “one of the most promising big band debuts in a long time.”
Schneider has been bolder still in “Coming About,” which dares to explore a vast dramatic narrative in the three-part “Scenes of Childhood,” while Schneider’s tone poem “El Viente” proves a tour de force of the orchestrator’s art.
Schneider, of course, knows well that she’s not the first woman to venture into the artistically and financially risky waters of big band jazz. From Mary Lou Williams’ work with Andy Kirk’s orchestra (in the ’20s through ’40s) to Melba Liston’s writing for Dizzy Gillespie’s and Randy Weston’s orchestras (beginning in the ’50s) to Akiyoshi’s experiments in piano-and-jazz orchestral pieces (starting in the ’60s), woman have fought hard to be heard in the most ambitious of jazz forums.
Still, it’s a struggle
The sad irony, though, is that the struggle is probably more difficult for Schneider than it was for her predecessors, if only because the heyday of the traveling big band has long since passed. Too costly to staff and send on tour, big bands these days typically stay in residence in one city, occasionally venturing to special, out-of-town dates.
“We just played the Kennedy Center” in Washington, D.C., says Schneider, “we managed to pay everyone in the band, and I made a negative $600.
“But I’ve never let myself be upset about the fact that times are like they are, that making a living in this music is so hard.
“I had no expectations from the start,” she adds, “so everything that has happened is just frosting on the cake.”
