A small-town childhood in southwest Minnesota, complete with figure-skating lessons and swoops across the vast emptiness of the plains in a six-seater aircraft piloted by a dad who works in the crop business, isn't exactly a classic antecedent of a career in jazz.
But there's nothing conventional about the career of composer Maria Schneider, whose one-of-a-kind reimagining of a big band, the Maria Schneider Orchestra, has blazed daring new trails in the jazz landscape, expressing its leader's highly personal vision with empathetic and exhilarating group interplay.
In close to two decades leading the New York-based orchestra, which formed as a group of young musicians in their 20s and has maintained a remarkably steady membership over the years, Schneider has earned acclaim as one of the most significant band leaders in the art, whose work extends well beyond jazz (let along big band) to make her a key American composer of the day. And after several nominations, she won a Grammy for her 2004 album, "Concert in the Garden."
Yet her fan base, while intense, is also quite narrow partly because - in keeping with her commitment to the road less traveled - her albums aren't available in traditional retail. Instead, she's a big proponent of the ArtistShare initiative, in which fans help fund albums that are then sold only online, resulting in smaller distribution but immensely more creative freedom and financial control.
The orchestra's concert tomorrow at the Berklee Performance Center will be its Boston premiere and will feature the American premiere of "Cerulean Skies," the 22-minute centerpiece of the group's new album, "Sky Blue," and an orchestral tour de force that swirls and billows like cumulonimbus clouds, augmented by real and simulated birdsong. (Schneider is, among other things, a birder and attuned to avian inspiration.)
Schneider's compositions are beautiful but also, as she explains on the phone from her Manhattan apartment, highly demanding of the 17 orchestra members - including four trumpets, three trom bones, woodwinds, piano, and rhythm section - and the four guests who appear on "Sky Blue."
"It's not a typical jazz gig," she says. "There's a lot of written music they have to be serious about. All these great improvisers, and they each get one or two solos at most." And the solos are different from those one would hear in a conventional jazz setting: "In typical jazz music the soloist is soloing over the harmonic structure of the song. Most of my pieces are through-composed: They develop as a story develops. The solo sections continue and modify and develop the harmony under the solo."
The result is a kind of coauthorship that is in some ways more constricting than what happens in a typical jazz gig, but in other ways it is more emotionally intense. "It's very intimate," Schneider says, "and at the end of the evening, the final product belongs to all of us."
Pianist Frank Kimbrough describes working with Schneider: "Her music requires a great amount of discipline. There's not a lot of what we call blowing sessions. It's much more through-composed, and there's a different way to find your freedom in it."
One aspect of what makes the band work is the deep familiarity the members have with one another. "I was making music for my contemporaries," Schneider says, "and we've all grown side by side over the years. Their own personal development affects me, and my development has affected some of them. It's a beautiful collaboration."
Kimbrough estimates he's been with the band since 1993, when it had a regular Monday gig at a small New York club. "We'd spend more money at the sushi joint next door before the show than we'd end up making that night," he says.
The perseverance on such a decidedly non-commercial project is a measure of the impact Schneider's compositional voice has had on her peers, as well as the uniqueness of her project, which, she says, originated somewhat by accident as a means of capitalizing on her big-band experience while making something more personal and new.
"Not much of it has been intent," she says. "When I was in school, my main focus was to be a really good writer. I thought maybe I'd go into film scoring."
The cinematic quality of her music suggests she never lost that particular inspiration. But when she arrived in New York, her playing and composing experience was essentially in big bands, and it made sense for her to start out in that form.
"I didn't want to have to start from go again," she says. "But to be honest I wasn't that crazy about big bands. Subconsciously I think I started using a lot of mutes and woodwinds to give it an orchestral sound."
She also got to work for a time with the late bandleader Gil Evans, who offered a blueprint for large-group jazz with both improvisational possibility and orchestral leanings. An evocation of Evans comes in the way she integrates Latin rhythms like choro and lando into her pieces. She has worked at length with Brazilian musicians, though she says her Latin fascination goes back to her childhood, when her father worked with agri-business colleagues from South America who would turn up at the family's Windom, Minn., kitchen table with intriguing accents and attitudes.
Coming full circle, Schneider has enjoyed bringing her musicians to her remote hometown and introducing them to the places and people she writes about. The exposure has helped the group to tap into both what is exotic, to a stereotypical New York jazz head, about the setting - the emptiness, the Americana - and to what is universal about music that comes from personal memory. "We all have childhoods, too," Kimbrough says, "so in a lot of ways we see hers and we relive our own."
This week, in the run-up to the concert, Schneider has been in residence at Berklee College of Music sharing her approach with aspiring players and composers. Technical proficiency, she says, is necessary but not sufficient. What she really wants to convey to young musicians is the value of finding one's voice.
"If you want to do something different than everybody else, so much the better," she says. "Everybody comes from a unique place."
