Maria Schneider was assistant arranger for Gil Evans in the last years of his life. Relaxed and charismatic, she occupies a musical space with the same inventive idiosyncrasy as Carla Bley. Schneider played two gigs at the weekend with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra - a prestigious band drawing on the younger generation of that country's best players. This project, Schneider announced, had raised a few eyebrows but it has also led the musicians to classic-jazz reworkings, to projects from Scottish composers and to a commission for US sax star Joe Lovano.
Schneider's sumptuous, beautifully crafted, mobile music revealed other pay-offs for such a gamble. Days of Wine and Roses was a typical Schneider reworking of a standard, glowing with subtle tone changes. Waltz for Toots (written for Toots Thielemans) was built from quiet bass beginnings and a swirling dress of a melody - featuring a pure-toned Laura Macdonald soprano sax solo - to splashes of ensemble sound that gathered into the portentous intensity of a hymn.
Unlike much jazz big-band music, Schneider's pieces often develop without dependence on the repetition of motifs or riffs; they constantly introduce fresh ideas as they grow, blossoming out of the narrative but providing a symphonic sense of long-range development within the tight confines of a song-like, jazz-structured space. Schneider's conducting is as absorbing to watch as her music is to listen to - it is as expressive as Gil Evans's was, though with a more tightly regulated outcome.
Allegresse, from Schneider's new CD, soared over a hypnotically steady rimshot pulse, like funk in a trance, then acquired a darker centre, like an intrusion from Holst's Mars, before trumpeter Tom McNiven and the gifted pianist Brian Kellock began recalling snatches of 1960s Miles Davis/Herbie Hancock dialogues. On The Love Theme From Spartacus, Tommy Smith's flute-like sax sound trembled like grass waving in a wind. Two quirky monster themes brought together Schneider's zigzagging melodic originality and some jazzy big-band fundamentals. That Old Black Magic ran the fast theme over wayward counter-melodies, and My Ideal set an audacious group melody like an orchestrated Charlie Parker solo in the midst of a pensive drifter. Not a synth or a loop for miles, but Schneider's music nevertheless sounds vibrantly of its time.
