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Maria Schneider: Decades. A boxful of treasure / DOWNBEAT Interview

Posted: June 18, 2024

Maria Schneider said of Decades, her new compilation release: ?“I just wanted to create something, put it in a beautiful box and say, ‘Look at what we did.‘”

DOWNBEAT's Suzanne Lorge writes…..Maria Schneider opened the sleek black box and placed it on a coffee table in her Manhattan apartment. Inside lay the three vinyl LPs of Decades, her new compilation release, each record tucked into its own brightly colored jacket.

“I tried to pick things that were monumental from each year,” the celebrated large-ensemble bandleader and composer told DownBeat. Schneider described how she and graphic designer Cheri Dorr created the progressive timelines that grace the jacket covers — timelines that condense the 30 years of The Maria Schneider Orchestra into a series of photos, album covers, gigs and award icons. The accompanying booklet — packed with more photos, big names, personal anecdotes — provides insight into the band’s landmark moments.

A deliciously rich package, it only begins to tell the story of Schneider’s formidable contributions to jazz — as the leader of a premier jazz ensemble, certainly, but also as one of the foremost exemplars of independent musicianship.

When Schneider released her first big band album, Evanescence, on the German imprint Enja in 1994, a jazz artist’s best option for a recording career was label representation. Under the then-existing business paradigm, her recording contract was a win. She soon noted, however, that at the center of the record industry’s traditional business model was an unfortunate compromise: The most successful artists didn’t necessarily receive compensation commensurate with their contribution to the label’s profits.

“My records were expensive to make, and I was at the point where I was helping invest in the making of them. But I wasn’t seeing the profit, and they were selling really well,” she said. “You know — I get it. I forget what the exact number is, but something like one out of 12 record albums was profitable. So, of course [the record companies] have to make a lot of money on [that one] recording in order to pay for the 11 that are losing.”

The encroaching digital revolution of those years only made it harder for musicians to earn fair compensation, Schneider explained, as traditional labels struggled to find new ways of monetizing their catalogs in an internet-driven world. Today, under labels’ third-party distribution contracts with digital media, musicians make less via streaming than they did through in-person sales, and much of their music is given away for free.

Schneider readily understood the impact that further technological advancements would have on musicians’ livelihoods. After Evanescence, she released two more studio albums through Enja — Coming About (1996) and Allégresse (2000) — before swearing off traditional labels. She’d found another way to forge ahead toward a profitable career, she thought — if it worked.

Around 2000, Schneider began a partnership with Brian Camileo, founder of ArtistShare, as the first musician ever to produce an album via the newly hatched alternative-finance platform. Through Camileo’s crowdsourcing site — something that hadn’t existed before — Schneiders’ fans would participate directly in subsidizing her recording projects and receive not only the album, but other bonuses based on their level of sponsorship.

“I wanted to bet on myself, instead of being with a record company and [having them] invest in me and take the pot of gold if I do well,” Schneider said. “I was willing to take on my own risk, as opposed to having somebody take on the risk for me.”

Schneider’s partnership with ArtistShare would lead to several unprecedented career turns: Concert In The Garden, her inaugural release through the site in 2004, became the first online-only release to win a Grammy Award. Her next five ArtistShare albums earned her not only a half dozen Grammys and a finalist spot for a Pulitzer Prize, but the bulk of each album’s profits. And, most remarkably, she’s used the ArtistShare business model to fund her big band recordings for the past 20 years, even when the budget rose to almost a quarter of a million dollars (for Data Lords in 2020).

“What is really incredible is how this whole ArtistShare thing has endured for me,” she said. “It’s still strong. It’s still enabling me to do whatever I want to do.”

While it’s impossible to know how Schneider’s career would have unfolded had she proceeded with a traditional label, suffice it to say that she has built an unparalleled oeuvre without one. Unparalleled and important: Over the course of these last 30 years, she has managed to strike the optimal balance between creative freedom and financial innovation — and in the process crushed all notions of how a musician’s career is supposed to happen.

Faced with the task of curating her works for the new album, however, Schneider encountered unforeseen considerations beyond the historical heft of her catalog. Each track could run only 20 minutes before the audio quality would begin to deteriorate. The seven albums from which she’d culled the 12 selected tracks were recorded and engineered in different studios on varying equipment. And, technical problems aside, she wanted to honor her loyalists’ preferences, her own feelings about the compositions and the many exceptional musicians who had played with the band over the years.

The process “took me on a trip that I didn’t expect,” Schneider said. “It was almost like writing a biography. I really wanted to represent those periods. It is a pretty amazing thing: 30 years. And the band and my writing have morphed in different phases that I now recognize. In the moment, though, you don’t know the different forces that are changing your music.”

(Photo: Briene Lermitte)

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