An Unexpected Candidate for Next Jazz Giant : Grammys: Bandleader/composer Maria Schneider is taking the big band format to new heights, and she just may win a statuette Wednesday for her trouble.

Maria Schneider knew she’d hit it big when, on a visit to her tiny hometown of Windom, Minn., she saw her name in the window of a shop on main street.

“It was in a story the Wall Street Journal did about me,” she says. “And I’m not sure if they pasted it up in the window because it was about me or because it mentioned Windom. I mean, it’s a very small town and I’m sure that it was the first and the last time that it ever got mentioned in a national publication like that.”

But it undoubtedly will not be the last time Schneider gets mentioned.

This week, the much-heralded young composer-bandleader will sit nervously in the audience at the Shrine Auditorium for the presentation of the 37th annual Grammy Awards, waiting to see if she is awarded a statuette for at least one of the two nominations she has received--for best large jazz ensemble performance and for best instrumental composition--for her first recording, “Evanescence.”

Schneider and Cuban-born pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba (nominated for best jazz instrumental performance), are, at 33, the youngest artists in this year’s assemblage of jazz Grammy nominees.

Aside from Schneider, Rubalcaba and bassist Marcus Miller (nominated for best contemporary jazz performance), the instrumental selections (the jazz vocalists’ category is all-female and African American) are strongly skewed this year in gender, race and age toward aging white males.

For that reason alone, the success of Schneider and her orchestra of talented young New York musicians couldn’t come at a better time. The absence in the nominations this year and last year of such influential players as Benny Green, Stephen Scott, Cyrus Chestnut, Teodross Avery and Roy Harper, among many others, suggests an especially shortsighted Recording Academy overview at a time when jazz is finally experiencing an impressive renaissance of new talent.

Some feel the problem involves more than shortsightedness. “They know about these young guys, but they just don’t want to hear anything that they’re not already familiar with,” suggests one longtime member, who insisted upon anonymity.

For Schneider, fully experiencing the bloom of her nominations, the internal selection process of the Recording Academy is of little interest.

“I don’t know much about it,” she says, “and I don’t have any idea whether I’ll win or not. But that’s not really what it’s all about anyhow. For me, it’ll be fun just to get to see all the famous people that I’ve never seen before. I mean, most of my work . . . is done at home sitting here all by myself like a hermit. So to get out and have an excuse to buy a dress for a party is unheard of for me. It’s great.”

Schneider is still Midwest and small town to the core.

“Windom is so small,” she says, “a little over 4,000 people, that it doesn’t even have a record store. So they sell my record at the florist shop. When I went home last Christmas, that’s where they had me signing CDs. There’s something special about growing up in a place like that, and I don’t think it will ever leave me.”

Small-town though her roots may be, Schneider’s music is sophisticated and contemporary. A former student of trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, she also was Gil Evans’ assistant toward the end of his life (he died in 1987 at 75). The image of the cherubic young Midwesterner, still in her early 20s, working with the tall, gaunt and aging Evans is fascinating.

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Considered by many to be one of the finest arrangers-composers in jazz history, Evans is best-known for his classic collaborations with Miles Davis on recordings such as “Sketches of Spain,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Miles Ahead” in the early ‘60s.

He also was known among musicians for the complexity of the scores he composed in his scrawled, hen-scratched musical shorthand. Schneider handled most of Evans’ score copying during the two years she worked for him.

“Once,” recalls Schneider, “he gave me a piece of small music on notebook paper--you know, those 3-by-5 things--and he’d done a complete score on it.”

The benefit for Schneider was the opportunity to observe, in action, the man who had been her musical idol.

“I remember one time,” she says, “when I saw him sitting at the piano for an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to voice a three-note chord for horns so as to get a specific sound he was hearing in his mind. That had a powerful impact on me, because finding the right timbral sound has always been an important part of my own composing.”

The effect that her formal arranging study with Brookmeyer and her musical association with Evans had on her work is apparent in her debut recording, “Evanescence,” which is dedicated to Evans. (See accompanying review.)

Schneider’s principal competition in the large ensemble category comes from two other female composer-bandleaders, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Carla Bley--both well-established jazz artists.

Ordinarily, the presence of three female composers in one jazz Grammy category would be a story in itself. Jazz has persisted as one of the last holdouts of the male world.

But the arena of arranging has generally been more open to females due in part, perhaps, to the pioneering efforts of Mary Lou Williams and Melba Liston. Schneider attests to having had few problems as a female in a largely male-dominated art.

“I never really thought that being a female had any special impact on my music even though it obviously must have,” she says. “But I don’t think it was any different from the fact that my music--as is anybody’s music--has also been impacted by my particular personality and my background.”

“It’s funny,” she adds. “When I was conducting some of my arrangements for a Toots Thielemans recording session in Europe . . . one of the musicians said, ‘You know, you’re just like one of the guys,’ I didn’t know whether to say ‘thank you’ or what.”

Despite her growing reputation as a composer-bandleader, however, obtaining a recording deal for her large ensemble--difficult for any artist, whether male or female--did not come easily. Schneider had first organized a group of with her husband, John Fedchock, in the late ‘80s. After their divorce, she formed her own ensemble, the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra, and has worked it every Monday night for the past two years (for $20 a player) at Visiones, a Manhattan jazz club.

When she finally got around to thinking about a recording, the prospects were not bright.

“I tried to get a company to finance it, any company,” she explains, “and everybody laughed--’Big band? Are you kidding?,’ they said. So I put down a lot of money and recorded the band myself. Then I tried to sell the tape . . . I got these enthusiastic responses from people at record companies. ‘We really love it,’ they said, ‘but we don’t know how to market you.’ ”

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Fortunately, Enja Records’ Matthias Winckelmann heard the band’s tape and decided to take a chance. “He told me,” says Schneider, “ ‘You know, my roster’s full, but I don’t care. I’m really enthusiastic about this, so let’s go for it.’ And he did.”

The best part of Schneider’s sudden burst of visibility, she feels, is simply that it has come despite her insistence upon doing things her own way.

“This band, this recording, happened because we all wanted to make music,” she says, “not because we were looking for a Grammy. And if we do win one, it will be because every musician in the band had a part in making it happen.”