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Jazz composer Maria Schneider: ‘David Bowie cracked me – maybe not in a good way’

The US musician has won star admirers and seven Grammys across three decades of lyrical and angry work – but you can’t stream it. She explains her fight against big tech, and her dismay at other artists’ apathy

Maria Schneider is one of the world’s most distinguished composers for jazz orchestra, a key collaborator for David Bowie and a seven-time Grammy winner – but if you stream all your music, it’s likely that you won’t have heard her work, and never will. “I don’t want to say it’s the middle of nowhere because to me it was the centre of the world, but it’s a very wide-open space.” Long stretches of her childhood were spent staring out of the window at a quiet highway, and her imagination would run free: every passing car carried talent scouts from New York, with devices capable of listening in on her piano practice. “It was like tasting a pickle for the first time: at first being like eww, and then being like ooh.” Early experiences of flying – with her father, who had a small company aircraft for his job in agriculture – would also shape her music, which cycles through feelings of acceleration, taking off, coasting, reflection, deceleration and landing.

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