Windom, Minnesota, is a small, quiet, mid-west cornbelt town, miles from anywhere. The people who live there, it's reasonable to suggest, are probably more in touch with each other's lives and feelings than those in big cities. Windom is a place where, to borrow Brian Moore's phrase from The Luck of Ginger Coffey, you're likely to find kindness and courtesy and decent ways.
It's quite a while since Maria Schneider lived in her home town, but years of being in New York - leading her own big band there since 1992 and issuing three critically acclaimed albums of her music with the orchestra - haven't erased those clear, well-rounded mid-west vowels. Neither have they draped caution or cynicism over a friendly and unpretentious personality. When she talks, it's still unguarded and totally natural.
Yet, as one of the best things to happen to composing and arranging for big bands in the past decade, she's accumulated more awards and acclaim than you could shake a stick at. And if Windom also seems an unlikely birthplace for someone so celebrated in the demanding world of jazz, it is not just because it's tiny and remote. Like most such places, it lacks the facilities and choices of big cities. But, unlike big cities, it shows hospitality to anyone who fetches up there.
So when a woman named Evelyn Butler joined her daughter in Windom from Chicago in the mid-1960s - her husband and son had died within a month of each other - Maria Schneider's parents invited her to dinner. Afterwards, she sat down and played the piano. For their daughter, it was an epiphany.
"I was just so taken," she recalls. "I was just five at the time and I was just so blown away. It was just like life became infused with joy from that moment. When I heard her play, I just wanted to be her. She was a really great stride pianist and a fantastic classical pianist and a very good organist, too."
Schneider begged her parents to let her study with Butler. And, she adds, she didn't have to shoulder the burden of any expectations about becoming a musician. "I just did it because I loved it. My parents never said: 'Oh, you have to practise'. And I think in life, you know, unless you really have the passion to follow through and do something because you have your own inner flame to do it, then any other reason to do something, in a way, seems like a mis-step."
There was a downside. "Because Windom was such a small town and so far from any big city," she explains, "there was no record store. They sold some records in the clothing store, so we had the new things that came out, like the new Simon and Garfunkel, and Tijuana Brass and all that. And then my mom had some old jazz recordings like Teddy Wilson and Ellington. And we had a lot of classical music: Stravinsky, Horowitz playing Chopin.
"So I didn't realise that music had evolved past swing. I didn't know that there was an evolution of jazz. I didn't know that bebop existed. So when I went to college I felt really sad. I felt that my dream would be to be a jazz pianist or something. But I didn't think it existed any more. I also felt that I was born in the wrong era."
College and the big city were a culture shock in other ways. "Coming from a small town, I had no confidence. I really felt that I couldn't possibly measure up to kids that had come from big cities and big schools with a fancy music programme. And I didn't realise what an amazing teacher I had. And I wasn't a particularly good pianist, not compared to kids that were going in as performance majors. I played well enough, but that was about it."
A jazz fan in college introduced her to the music of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Bill Evans and a host of others. "I had this future shock, where all of a sudden I was immersed in a world that I didn't even know existed. So at that point when, I was taking my classical studies, I didn't even want to listen to that stuff. I just wanted to listen to Gil Evans and George Russell and Thelonious Monk. I was like a sponge for all this jazz."
Significantly, Evans, Russell and Monk are all composers. "Yeah. I was attracted to jazz musicians who were really interesting compositionally. Even when I was young I was always listening to things compositionally. If I played a Chopin piece I would always examine it. I told my teacher that I hated Chopin's endings, that I thought he was horrible at writing endings. This I could do better myself - which was crazy, you know; I hadn't written anything." She gives an embarrassed laugh at the memory.
All serious American jazz musicians, sooner or later, wind up in the Big Apple. A grant to study with composer and valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer took her there and work - eight years of it - as a music copyist put food on the table. "I have a big bump still on my writing finger from all that," she says, laughing again. Despite what computers can do, she still loves a hand-copied manuscript and every now and then gets one done.
She also worked with Gil Evans as an assistant. Evans, who died in 1988, was a wonderfully individual voice who worked on such marvellous albums as Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess with Miles Davis, and Out of the Cool and The Individualism of Gil Evans under his own name. He's the one Schneider mentions most often as her prime influence.
"Actually," she says, "Brookmeyer and Gil Evans were the ones that made me really see that somehow I had a place as a composer for jazz musicians. Gil Evans's music touched me because the textures were so beautiful and kind of sensual and veiled. They weren't so direct and harsh as normal big band music.
"And then Brookmeyer really influenced me and made me see a place compositionally, because his music was so thoroughly developed and compositional. The pieces would go through different sections; it wasn't just theme and variations where you write a tune and have soloists play on it and then you write a shout chorus and you're out. The music was just so deeply developed in a long-form way."
Evans used to tell her he felt intimidated by Brookmeyer because he thought he was so intellectual. "And he is, absolutely, but Gil Evans also was very intellectual, but he didn't have that view of himself because he was self-taught."
Does it bother her that people mention Gil Evans so often in connection with her own work?
"Not really," she answers. "Sometimes when people ask me about my music and they have no idea about it, about the closest thing I can come to is Gil, only because I like translucent colours. It gives them some idea of the colour concept of the music. But Gil and I have such a different way of orchestrating, even though I like mutes and I like woodwinds." As did Evans, especially at slow tempos, at which he was a master.
"The thing that I always experiment with is, for instance, mixing an alto flute with a clarinet and a bucket mute trombone, so that when you hear it you have no idea what the sound is. You hear something kind of round. Or a chord with like one harmon mute in it doubling with some note, so that looking into it as colours, it's the kind of red that somebody sees as orange and another says it's red. I like to mix instrumental colours in that same way, which Gil didn't," she explains.
But whatever Evans did, it was absolutely his own. "Oh, God," she agrees, "it's gorgeous. His has such transparency and beauty.
"And the other thing is the way I deal with form," she explains. "You know, these pieces that go through a lot of different sections and stuff, that's definitely something that Gil didn't do. He was more of a short-form writer."
That being the case, how does she square the circle of her composer's vision with keeping improvising soloists in mind?
"It's really difficult. My pieces go through a lot of different sections, so if I'm composing a piece where there's a solo, the question is how do you compose with a piece that has a feeling of inevitability, when there's a completely unknown factor there of a soloist? And I've found that more often I'm satisfied if I keep my compositional hand in some of the material underneath the soloist. Now, more often, I try to create harmony that changes underneath the solo and slowly works into the compositional stuff, so that there's a kind of seamlessness from the improvisation and the musical intent underneath."
It's been a long road for her to travel to reach this point and, though it hasn't been easy, her passion for music has been the sustaining element. "There's been so many points in my life where something's happened that's just very difficult to face; someone you love has it horrible, or loneliness, or death, or losing your friend or breaking up with somebody. Or joyful moments.
"When you sit down to play the piano or, for me, write a piece, to have a place where you can put those feelings into something tangible - to turn it into music - it becomes like a stream to get those feelings moving and not just of sitting there," she says.
'I can't describe it. It's like a gift. It's such a survival thing. There's been a few moments where I sat down and just played a beautiful Chopin piece and I felt so good and I just thought: 'Wow, I can't imagine not having this in my life'.
"And that's one thing I have to say I'm very careful about. There have been moments in my life where I got so caught up in running from here to there to do concerts, or having to write a lot of things on commission, and then I'm scared I'm not doing it well enough because I'm under too much pressure. And when music becomes that to me I just step back and I quit taking commissions and I don't take work for a little while, because I never want music to become a job."
She has other interests, among them Jewish and Catholic mysticism, and poetry. "I just love to read things that tap into that same place that music does. Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter once said to me: 'Miles used to love music that doesn't sound like music.' I know exactly what he means. "I keep looking for that, you know, trying to reach that place.
"It's the most bizarre thing how music can touch some other place and nobody knows what that is. And that's what we all go for, and to have the pursuit of that be the way that you make your living - even though sometimes it's really a struggle." She pauses and laughs: "Pretty damn lucky".
Maria Schneider conducts the Brussels Jazz Orchestra in a concert of her music at Vicar Street next Sunday in the finale of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival. Tel: 01-6725666