The jazz big band sound has undergone a remarkable evolution since the pre-World War II days of the great Swing Era dance bands. Most of the ensembles of today are led by composer/arrangers who need a regular performance vehicle for their music. One of the best of these is Maria Schneider, who will bring her remarkable band to The Music Hall in Portsmouth Sunday evening, Jan. 22, to share her thoughtful and colorful compositions with the audience.

Included in the performance will be the premiere of a new work, “The Pretty Road,” a piece commissioned by The Music Hall and several New England presenting houses, including the Hopkins Center in Hanover.

Newsday has stated that Schneider “becomes one with such ambitious, idiosyncratic masters of orchestral jazz as Charles Mingus, Carla Bley and her mentors Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer.” This is a heady, but accurate statement.

Since the debut of her first recording on Enja Records, 1992’s “Evanescence,” Schneider has enjoyed an increasingly visible career that reached a high point in 2005 when she won the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble for her CD “Concert In The Garden.” Schneider also won several awards from the Jazz Journalists Association at their annual awards show in New York City last June.

Schneider describes herself as a storyteller, and her music over the years has at times had an autobiographical aura to it. But her music is equally about creating a rich palette of tonal colors and textures. To be sure, this isn’t your grandparents hot, driving, swinging big band music. Rather, it takes you on a journey to a variety of musical locales.

Craig Skeffington, director of music at South Portland (Maine) High School and a talented big band composer in his own right (Seacoast Big Band and various high school jazz bands around the region) regards her music as both fresh and creative.

“More to the point, to me, she has almost created a whole new genre within the big band idiom,” he says. “Her pieces rely solely on her knowledge of colors and orchestration. They have little to do with the explosiveness and pyrotechnics that, if not cliché in this style, are certainly at least commonplace.”
To watch Schneider conduct her group on stage is refreshing to behold. Rather than rigidly conducting the group, she gently bobs and weaves in time with the music, drawing out the nuances and colors within. This movement results in her being at one with the group as well as being an integral part of the performance, enhancing its overall effect.

One of the consistent comparisons made about Schneider’s music and her approach to her group is to the style of Duke Ellington. Dave Seiler, director of the University of New Hampshire Jazz Band, elaborates on this point.

“In my opinion, Maria is almost a natural extension of Ellington in that she writes her music with the members of her band in mind, much in the same way that Ellington did. For this reason, it’s difficult for other bands to play her music successfully as it depends so much on the individuals and their personalities,” he says. “Also, like Ellington, she continues to break new ground with her compositions, fusing jazz and Latin rhythms or jazz and rock. Her music is really some of the most interesting and even provocative music on the scene today.” 

Much as Ellington enjoyed relationships with longtime band members, such as saxophonists Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves and Harry Carney and trombonist Lawrence Brown, so to does Schneider. Among the longtime members of her band are trumpet players Ingrid Jensen and Laurie Frink and saxophonists Scott Robinson and Rick Margitza.

There was a time when the big bands ruled the popular music world here in the United States, especially in the pre-World War II years. With the advent of the bebop style, the big bands, especially the dance big bands, quickly fell out of favor as jazz fans became more interested in the small group sound. However, in the late 1940s and ’50s, leaders such as Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman kept the big band flame burning, adapting their sound and their music into more of a listening rather than dancing mode.

In the late 1960s, drummer Buddy Rich launched a new big band that combined the brash, hard swinging sound of the earlier era with the more contemporary approach of the modern day. Rich was also one of the first to popularize the extended music arrangement, often in the form of a suite. His commissions of two of these from composer Bill Reddie, the well-known “West Side Story Medley” and “Channel One Suite,” were ahead of their time at that point and are still popular with school bands today. Also in the mid-1960s, the birth of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra set the pace for the growth of the composer-fronted big bands.

Others to come along over the next three decades included the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band, Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass, the Bob Florence Orchestra and the Bob Mintzer Big Band. Recently emerging bands on the scene today include Boston’s Greg Hopkins Jazz Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band, the Anita Brown Jazz Orchestra and the Jazz Heritage Orchestra of the Mid-West. Brown is a graduate of UNH who has been developing her band in New York over the past several years.

The Count Basie Band still tours to this day, and the Jones-Lewis band has been re-born into the current Vanguard Jazz Orchestra in New York. The band still plays every Monday night at the Village Vanguard, carrying on a tradition that is almost 40 years old. And in states all across the country, big bands ranging form amateur to professional and in schools, colleges and universities can be found keeping the flame alive, including this area’s long-running group, the Seacoast Big Band.

So, when Maria Schneider and her Jazz Orchestra play this Sunday evening, the audience will be treated to a refreshing new voice in the idiom, one that is expanding the boundaries and charting an exciting new course in the evolution of a timeless instrumental ensemble sound. It should make for a memorable evening, indeed.

Maria Schneider Orchestra
The Music Hall, Portsmouth
Sunday, Jan. 22 at 7 p.m.
$38-$17
603-436-2400
www.themusichall.org