People always say, how do you know when a piece is done. It's like, okay, when I quit feeling

distress, when I quit feeling like, I don't like that, that's not right. Trust your enthusiasm.

Then you get this organic connected thing.

Welcome back to working. I'm your host, Isaac Butler. And I'm your other host, Nate Chinenn.

Nate always good to see your face in a little rectangle on Zoom. Uh, who's our guest this week?

Our guest is the incredible Grammy-winning composer, arranger, and band leader, Maria Schneider.

Amazing. Now I am a Maria Schneider fan, but just for the listeners who might not be familiar with her,

why did you want to speak with her and what makes her big band work so special?

Well, it's so evocative and it's just beautiful and coloristic and flowing and really has a

sonic signature and an identity that is almost instantly recognizable.

As you said, I'm a big fan of her music too. I've had the pleasure of observing and writing

about it for about 25 years now. But really, what led me to her was the format and purpose of this

show, you know, because there's just so much emotional depth and precise detail in her work as

a composer. And that's something that's unfamiliar to most people in the particulars, you know,

how do you do that? But really relatable in a broader sense.

So before we begin, there's a couple people who come up in the interview that I think it's

worth kind of discussing a little more at length for our listeners who maybe aren't that familiar

with jazz history. Those are two of Maria's mentors, Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer. Who are

Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer and why are they important? Well, these are two of really the

Mount Rushmore figures of modern jazz orchestration. And Gil Evans is probably the better known of the

two, partly because of his affiliation with Miles Davis, which began with the birth of the

cool in the late 40s and then continued in the 50s and early 60s in these really masterpiece

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