Featuring eight new original works by the leader, The Thompson Fields makes brilliant use of Schneider's 18-piece jazz orchestra, a long-standing ensemble that spotlights such first rank players as Donny McCaslin, Rich Perry, Frank Kimbrough and Lage Lund. The performances reveal an ever-deepening relationship between Schneider and her musicians, many of whom she has worked with over a quarter of a century.
The album follows a momentous year that found Schneider's recent album Winter Morning Walks garnering three wins in the classical category of the 2014 GRAMMY Awards, making her one of the rare musicians to win GRAMMYs in both the jazz and classical categories. The CD is powered by ArtistShare and available exclusively at. With that recording, Schneider began to develop her personal way of writing for her 17-member collective, made up of many of the finest musicians in jazz today, tailoring her compositions to distinctly highlight the uniquely creative voices of the group. Subsequently, the Maria Schneider Orchestra has performed at festivals and concert halls worldwide. She herself has received numerous commissions and guest conducting invites, working with over 85 groups from over 30 countries spanning Europe, South America, Australia, Asia and North America. Schneider and her orchestra have a distinguished recording career with ten GRAMMY nominations and three GRAMMY awards, spanning both jazz and classical categories. Unique funding of projects has become a hallmark for Schneider through the trend-setting company, ArtistShare®.
For these projects, she documents her creative process for participating fans, who 'fan-fund' her recordings. Her album, Concert in the Garden (2004) became historic as the first recording to win a GRAMMY with Internet-only sales, and through crowdfunding. It blazed the 'fan-funding' trail as ArtistShare's first release. Her albums, Concert in the Garden and Sky Blue were both named 'Jazz Album of the Year' by the Jazz Journalists Association and DOWNBEAT Critics Poll, and received wide critical acclaim. In 2012, her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, awarded Schneider an honorary doctorate, and in 2014, ASCAP awarded her their esteemed Concert Music Award.
There’s a difference between understanding something and accepting it. When you play Jazz, you can copy those who most impress you on your instrument, but at some point you have to step back and accept what you can do in developing your own style on the instrument. This doesn’t mean complacency. You should continue to practice and try to improve your skills.
The more technical mastery you have the easier it becomes to free your mind to invent your improvisations. Also important is the lesson contained in the following excerpt from George Shearing’s autobiography: “.becoming a jazz pianist with some direction about what your style is going to be. That involves thinking about who you're going to follow or how you're going to develop a style of your own, and from what grounds.”. Willis Conover (1920-1996) was a jazz producer and broadcaster on the Voice of America for over forty years.
He produced jazz concerts at the White House, the Newport Jazz Festival, and for movies and television. Conover is credited with keeping interest in jazz alive in the countries of eastern Europe through his nightly broadcasts during the cold war when jazz was banned by most of the communist governments. Conover was not well known in the United States, even among jazz aficionados, but his visits to eastern Europe and Russia brought huge crowds and star treatment for him. The Digital CollectionThe UNT Digital Library contains a small selection of program lists, recording schedules, and promos that come from a much larger collection of Conover materials available in tangible form at the UNT Music Library. The Physical CollectionA 1997 gift of the Willis Conover Jazz Preservation Foundation, Inc., the physical collection consists of over 22,000 recordings of all kinds, correspondence, memos, magazines, record catalogs, manuscripts, program notes, memorabilia, photographs, books, and other personal items. Many of the recordings and books are being added to the regular collection, cataloged in the UNT Libraries' online catalog, and allowed to circulate.
The archival and historical material will be made available as special collections.For more information, including inventories of circulating recordings, please see the UNT Music Library's page. “Jazz musicians are their music. Absent that, they're just people making a living, eating meals, paying bills — no different from cops or politicos. But that's just the point: the music can't be subtracted: it's the defining essence, which sets musicians apart, makes them special and ultimately a little mysterious.
Makes their various complexes and misbehaviors interesting to writers, chroniclers, fans. Would British writer Geoff Dyer, for example, have found Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, and the other walking pathologies celebrated in his BUT BEAUTIFUL (Farrar, Straus, 1996) so fascinating had it not been for the music they made? Subtract the music and you have just another chronicle of aberrant thought and behavior. In a review of his book, I wondered whether Dyer would have been similarly drawn to musicians such as Henry “Red” Allen, Dizzy Gillespie, and Red Norvo, no less brilliant, who seem to have led balanced, eminently non-neurotic lives.”. Hi Steven, You don't know me - and I don't really know you, but I’ve been enjoying your Jazz Profiles blogspot for some time now.
(Specifically the recent Roy DuNann piece.) So first of all: thanks for that! Secondly, the reason for me writing you is that I’ve been quite busy organizing my jazz collection and have compiled and uploaded a handful of homemade radio shows on the podcast platform Mixcloud. Initially this was a project intended for Izaak, my son, who’s only two years old right now, but I think they’d be quite interesting for any true classic bop and hard bop jazz lovers.
Problem is; nobody's listening to them. I thought, if you shared my enthusiasm, they perhaps could be linked somehow to your blogspot. But only if you think that’s appropriate. Two important notes: 1: there’s absolutely no commercial incentive involved here 2: the podcasts are a hundred percent non stop music, so no talking, jingles or add’s etc. Check them out, if you have the time. Right now there are five compilations, each one focussing on on a major jazz label, so there’s Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy, Riverside and Contemporary for now. Ok, so that’s basically it.
Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra
Amazon Music
Maria Schneider Orchestra Personnel
Thanks for taking the time and let me know what you think. Kind regards, Geugie Hoogeveen the Netherlands.