Archives for 2007

I find it all but impossible to believe that nearly two decades have gone by since I met Maria Schneider. I had the good luck to hear Maria’s music when she was just getting started as a bandleader, and the good sense to recognize that it bore the stamp of something more than mere talent. From then on I followed her work closely, and when I started contributing profiles to The Wall Street Journal a few years later, she was at the top of my short list of people about whom I wanted to write. So far as I know, “At 33, a Composer of Note,” which was published in the Journal on October 7, 1994, was the first time anyone wrote at length about Maria outside of the jazz press, a fact of which I have long been sinfully proud, never more so than when she won her first Grammy two years ago. It’s nice to be ahead of the crowd–and even nicer when it finally catches up with you.

Last week I went to the Jazz Standard to hear Maria’s band play selections from Sky Blue, their latest CD. As I listened, I marveled for the umpteenth time that such richly colored, meticulously wrought sounds had sprung from the mind of so improbable a creature. Maria is a giggly, irrepressibly enthusiastic strawberry blonde who is…well, let’s just call her the kind of person to whom stuff happens. Whenever she returns from the road, she always has hair-raising adventures to report, some of which will pop up in her music sooner or later. Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

Maria is a thoughtful, introspective woman who has known her share of sorrow and been toughened by it. Yet I can’t think of another artist who is less guarded, especially when she clambers onto a bandstand and starts telling an audience about the next piece on the program. Like my late friend Nancy LaMott, Maria is a blurter, and anything can happen when she gets in front of a microphone. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve listened to one of her helter-skelter monologues and asked myself how it was possible that so zany a person could have brought pieces like “Hang Gliding,” “Buleria, Soleá y Rumba,” and “Cerulean Skies” into the world. Nothing is as mysterious as creativity, even when you know the creator. Especially when you know the creator.

I left my Wall Street Journal profile of Maria out of the Teachout Reader because it was too short to stand on its own, and also because I’d already spun part of it into the liner notes I wrote for Coming About, her second album. It occurs to me that you might be interested in reading the original piece, which hasn’t been reprinted since it appeared in the Journal in 1994. (Alas, Visiones, the much-loved Greenwich Village nightclub referred to in the piece, closed its doors years ago.) Better pieces have been written about Maria Schneider since then, but this one had the virtue of being first.

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According to the history books, the big-band era came to a screeching halt in December 1946, when eight of the country’s top bandleaders (among them Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Harry James) folded their tents and retired to the land where the good songs go. Forty-eight years later, big bands are the dinosaurs of the music business–unwieldy, expensive and, some think, headed inexorably for extinction. But try telling that to the 17 musicians who gather every Monday night at Visiones, a Greenwich Village nightclub, to play the music of Maria Schneider, a slight, strawberry-blond woman who, at the age of 33, is regarded by a rapidly growing number of insiders as one of the most promising young jazz composers in the world.

Schneider, who hails from Windom, Minn. (pop. 4,288), doesn’t look like a composer or act like a musician. “People are always asking me if I sing with the band,” she complains laughingly. In fact, she doesn’t even play with the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra. All she does is lead it–waving her arms in a T-square junior-high band director’s beat straight out of Conducting 101–and write the music it performs.

It’s hard for a musician who specializes exclusively in composition to make much of an impression on the chops-conscious virtuosos of the jazz world. But Schneider knows it can be done, because she worked closely with one of the few people who has done it: Gil Evans, the master composer who arranged Miles Davis’s classic albums “Sketches of Spain,” “Miles Ahead” and “Porgy and Bess.” Schneider was Evans’s musical assistant during the last three years of his life. “Gil was relaxed, calm, incredibly sweet, gentle, spiritual,” she recalls. Before meeting Evans, she studied with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, who wrote brilliant arrangements for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra.

Working with Evans and Brookmeyer inspired Schneider to develop a stunningly original sound of her own. She can write old-fashioned flagwaver-with-a-shout-chorus charts whenever she pleases, but prefers to turn out harmonically complex originals with subtly blended instrumental colors that suggest Evans without ever borrowing from him. Though her music has a fresh, childlike quality that mirrors her friendly small-town demeanor, Schneider also has a sure-footed grasp of formal structure–one of Brookmeyer’s obsessions–that is rare in a jazz composer. “I think my music has a strong element of fantasy in it,” she says, adding that the inspirations for her compositions are as likely as not to be visual: dreams, paintings (“Some Circles” is named for a canvas by Kandinsky), even ballets (a self-described “New York City Ballet freak,” Schneider would love to write a score for Jerome Robbins).

With the great days of the road bands long past, the only way for a jazz composer like Schneider to get his or her work played regularly is to put together a group. She did so in 1989, initially in collaboration with trombonist John Fedchock, who played with and wrote for Woody Herman’s last band. (Schneider is now sole leader of the group.)

“You can’t imagine how expensive it is to start a band,” she says. “In New York, just to rehearse costs around $150 to hire a studio and rent sound equipment. Then you have to get the music together. The Xeroxing, the time spent copying the parts–it adds up fast. There aren’t that many clubs, either, and they can’t pay that much because they aren’t doing that well. We’re so lucky to have Visiones.”

Since there aren’t enough jobs available to keep a big band together full time, Schneider does what Jones and Lewis did before her: She pays 17 players $20 a night to get together on Mondays (in most big cities, Monday is musicians’ night off) and perform her music. The personnel, though basically constant, necessarily fluctuates from week to week. The musicians occasionally send substitutes in order to make more lucrative gigs, but when the first-string team is in place and the moon is in phase, the band can blow the roof off Visiones without even raising a sweat. Not that Schneider minds seeing unfamiliar faces on Monday night: “I used to really panic when strange people were sight reading on the bandstand, but I don’t anymore. A lot of times, just one new player can spark a whole new enthusiasm in the band.”

Unlike many jazz composers, Schneider refuses to write commercial music in order to eke out a living: “I did do two jingles when I first came to New York, but it was disastrous–I did nothing but cry the entire time I wrote them.” At first, she worked as a music copyist for other composers and arrangers; she now underwrites her band by accepting composing projects from the state-subsidized TV and radio orchestras of Europe, where her reputation is high. But in the U.S., Schneider was for many years known only to jazz lovers lucky enough to stumble into Visiones on a Monday night.

In order to spread the word about her band, Schneider recorded nine of her best charts, paying for the studio time out of her own pocket, and shopped the master tape around to various record companies. Enja Records liked what it heard and turned the tape into her first CD, “Evanescence,” released earlier this year to uniformly enthusiastic reviews.

“I still have people telling me that I need to make my music a little more commercial to make money,” Schneider says. “But I think that if you stick to the thing you really love and work really hard at it, you can create your own market–your music will be unique, and people will come to hear you. And if they don’t, I’d still rather copy music or flip burgers for a living. I could live with that. I couldn’t live with writing commercial music that I don’t feel from my heart.”

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To purchase Sky Blue, go here.

“Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?”
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

A reader writes:

I greatly enjoyed your Mencken book and am looking forward to the Armstrong bio. I have enjoyed some writing about him in the past, but never felt I read anything definitive–so please write that book!

To which the only possible response is…yikes! I don’t think there can be such a thing as a definitive biography of a great man. Louis Armstrong is simply too large, both as an artist and as a man, to be summed up for all time between the covers of a single book. Even if such a thing were possible, the resulting book would be unreadably long. That’s why the subtitle of The Skeptic was “A Life of H.L. Mencken,” not “The Life of H.L. Mencken.” As I said in the preface, “I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting.”
So what am I trying to do? The answer can be found in this excerpt from the preface to my book, of which the first seven chapters (there are twelve) are now complete. If you want to know why I decided to write yet another book about Satchmo, the answer is here.
* * *
Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, and much has been written about his life and work, some of it penetrating and perceptive. Yet this is, surprisingly, the first fully sourced biography of Armstrong to be written by an author who is also a trained musician–though it is not a “scholarly” biography in the ordinary sense of the word. I see this book less as a work of original scholarship than an act of synthesis, a narrative biography based on the research of those academic scholars and other investigators who in recent years have unearthed a wealth of hitherto unknown information about Armstrong, especially regarding his early years….
I have also been privileged to draw on archival material unavailable to previous biographers, including 650 reels of tape recordings privately made by Armstrong during the last quarter-century of his life and subsequently deposited by Lucille, his fourth and last wife, in the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College/CUNY. These recordings, as will become evident, are of considerable significance, and I have made extensive use of them, just as I have drawn heavily on Armstrong’s own writings, both published and unpublished. He was one of a handful of jazz musicians, and the only major one, to leave behind a substantial body of prose writing (including two full-length autobiographies, dozens of magazine articles, and hundreds of letters) in which his thoughts are presented in wholly or largely unmediated form, and it is in his own words that he comes across most clearly.
I have sought to make every page of this book comprehensible to the general reader. At the same time, I hope it will be of interest to specialists, especially those who know more about Armstrong’s music than his life. It goes without saying–or should–that his music was the most important thing about him, but his personal story, in addition to shedding light on the wellsprings of his art, is significant in its own right, and is no less deserving of a historically aware interpretation….
Armstrong was a child of his time, not ours, and some of the things he did and said as an adult are scarcely intelligible to those who know little about the long-lost world of his youth. Even in his own time he was widely misunderstood, often by people who should have known better (and who in some cases came to know better). For this reason I have tried to place him and his achievements in the widest possible perspective. He was, of course, the central figure in twentieth-century jazz, but he was also a key figure in the modern movement in art, as well as an emblematic figure in the history of American culture and, in the opinion of all who knew him, a great man. “I know of no man for whom I had more admiration and respect,” Bing Crosby wrote to Lucille after Armstrong died. The ultimate purpose of this book is to explain to a new generation of listeners why those words still ring true.

“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Broadway is still on strike, so I flew to Chicago last weekend to see the Victory Gardens production of Nilo Cruz’s A Park in Our House and the Court Theatre’s revival of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. Read all about it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Cruz, who was born in Cuba in 1961, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for “Anna in the Tropics,” a sumptuously old-fashioned play whose high drama and luxuriant language delighted me when I saw it on Broadway. “A Park in Our House,” written in 1996, works the same rich vein of poetic naturalism. Set in Cuba in 1970, it shows what happens when Dimitri (Lance Baker), a Russian scientist, spends a month with a family whose members are suffering from the effects of life under Castro. The father (Gustavo Mellado) is a government apparatchik who no longer believes in the system he serves and has been rendered impotent by his subservience, while Pilar (Marcela Muñoz), his daughter, is a nubile, idealistic teenager who fancies herself a “romantic revolutionary” and longs to live in Moscow but settles for sleeping with Dimitri. She is too naïve to fully understand what the adults with whom she lives know from hard experience, which is that her country is a prison of the heart, a place where fear and distrust seep into every human transaction and even the unconscious mind is tainted….
Mr. Cruz knows how to make his dialogue sing and shine, and the six members of the cast of “A Park in Our House,” co-produced by Victory Gardens Theater and Teatro Vista, a local Latino company, are no less adept at making the most of the gorgeous speeches he has put in their mouths….
Joe Orton was the Great Anarch of postwar farce, and had he not been bludgeoned to death in 1967 at the cruelly early age of 34, he would now be universally acknowledged as a major playwright. Instead, his posthumous reputation is based on only three full-length plays, the last of which, “What the Butler Saw,” has just been revived by the Court Theater, the University of Chicago’s much-admired professional ensemble. I have some problems with this production, but it works–the opening-night crowd laughed itself silly–and if you’ve never seen any of Orton’s plays, it’s a plausible place to start.

To read the whole thing, go buy a copy of this morning’s Journal. This used to be where I recommended that you subscribe to the paper’s online edition, but now that Rupert Murdoch has announced his intention to make the subscription-only Online Journal free at some point in the near future, I’ve cut that out! (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, you’ll find my column here.)
UPDATE: A fellow blogger advises me that it is already possible for nonsubscribers to read my Journal reviews by clicking on the Online Journal links that I provide in this space each week. How about that? Act accordingly!

Inspired by the stagehands’ strike, I did some poking around and discovered that the top price of a ticket to a Broadway show, controlled for inflation, has gone up 100% since 1968. Has Broadway really gotten twice as good in the past 39 years? Curious, I pulled out my New Yorker CD-ROMs, looked up the “Goings On About Town” theater listings for the issue of November 23, 1968…and quickly realized that I’d come up with the makings of a “Sightings” column.
Is Broadway worth it–or are there better theater-related entertainment deals to be had elsewhere, both in and out of New York? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column in the Weekend Journal section, in which I ask some hard questions about the current state of the Great White Way.
UPDATE: To read the whole thing, go here (I think!).