On Sunday afternoon Mrs. T and I departed Connecticut and slogged our endless way through post-holiday traffic, finally reaching our Manhattan apartment just in time to turn around and head downtown to the Jazz Standard to catch Maria Schneider’s first set and eat shrimp and grits and deviled eggs (the Jazz Standard being one of a handful of jazz clubs whose cuisine is noteworthy).
Maria and I go back a long way. I wrote about her for the first time twenty years ago in The Wall Street Journal, and she has figured prominently on this blog ever since I launched it in 2003. I know her music well and admire it without reserve. She is one of the very few artists of my acquaintance whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius (though she never acts like one). Yet she’s still capable of astonishing me after all these years, which was what happened last night when her band played “The Thompson Fields,” the title track of her newly recorded album, about which you can read by going here.
Maria and her big band always spend the week of Thanksgiving in residence at the Jazz Standard, and Mrs. T and I usually go to hear them there. We weren’t able to make it into town last year, though, meaning that I hadn’t heard any of her music performed live since Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington was published. Perhaps for that reason, Ellington was much on my mind as I listened to “The Thompson Fields.” It’s what he would have called a “tone parallel” of the Minnesota farm country where Maria grew up, a musical landscape that is by turns delicate and grand. She is our Ellington, I thought. She paints with sound. But almost in the same instant I found myself thinking of another great composer, Aaron Copland. Like Appalachian Spring or Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Maria’s spacious, sweepingly lyrical music speaks to the listener in an accent that is uniquely and unmistakably American—and like those two masterpieces, it drew unexpected tears from me.
“My God, Maria, that was beautiful,” I told her after the set was over. “Beautiful like Copland.”
“Did you really think so?” she asked, her face aglow with unselfconscious delight. “I thought it went pretty well at the recording session.”
“I bet it did,” I replied. “I just bet it did.”
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A promotional video for The Thompson Fields: