Schneider Steps Into Limelight

Maria Schneider wanted to be a dancer when she was growing up in the small Minnesota town of Windom. Instead, she became a composer, working primarily in the genre of jazz but never abandoning either her affection or her affinity for dance.

On Sunday evening at the Cal State Northridge Performing Arts Center, Schneider also revealed that she hasn’t really given up on her physical connection with dance either. A slender, graceful woman garbed in a tank top and black pants, she conducted her Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra with elegant balletic movements. Moving her arms in willowy fashion, using her body to emphasize dramatic highpoints, she had a quality of oneness with the music that was reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Visual presentation is appealing, of course, but the ultimate test of a composer is in the music. And Schneider’s music is like no other in the jazz world. Working with the standard big jazz band instrumentation of four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones and a rhythm section, she creates an astonishing array of multi-textured sounds. Some were clearly influenced by her early apprenticeship with Gil Evans in the ‘80s; others revealed inner contrapuntal movement similar to the work of Bill Holman.

But every composer has to start somewhere. And, despite the occasional awareness of her youthful sources, Schneider’s music was the expression of a mature and complex musical mind, one that has found a unique and personal creative voice of its own.

The nearly three-hour program ranged through original works from Schneider’s three commercially released albums--”Coming About,” “Evanescence” and “Allegresse” (all nominated for Grammy Awards)--as well as a harmonically mobile arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”

The highlights came with great frequency: the Latin rhythms of “El Viento” framing a soaring trumpet solo by Greg Gisbert; the lovely “Journey Home” and the title track from “Allegresse”; a movement from her Monterey Jazz Festival-commissioned work, “Scenes From Childhood,” featuring tenor saxophonist Rick Margitza; the atmospheric sounds and gutsy guitar work of John Hart on “Tork’s Cafe.”

Schneider also offered a particularly impressionistic work, “Hang Gliding,” as a convincing evocation of the feelings she experienced while glidingfrom the mountains above Rio. And her “Three Romances”--embracing everything from early Brazilian chorro to an accompaniment for a classical pas de deux (symbolized by the solos of trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and saxophonist Charles Pillow)--was the product of a musical imagination that dances freely, unencumbered by stylistic boundaries or prior musical definitions.