Maria Schneider is a rarity in the world of jazz. She’s a composer in the vein of Duke Ellington with her own orchestra, at a time when most players work in small combos. Her 18-piece ensemble sometimes blasts like a big band, but most of the time they play music that sounds intimate and deeply personal.

Studio 360 will follow Schneider’s creative process as she puts together her latest album. To begin, Kurt Andersen pays a visit to her apartment in New York, where she’s still tinkering with the harmonies on some of the pieces. Schneider plays a song in progress that’s based on an experience she had back home in southern Minnesota, where she climbed to the top of a silo and looked out at a field of soybeans. But, she says, the song isn’t quite there yet. “I’m not happy until I am sitting on that silo.”

Schneider explains that she found an early talent for big band music, and kept getting work. “It just felt like I got on a train and I never got off,” she says. Schneider apprenticed under Gil Evans, the legendary arranger who worked with Miles Davis. Evans encouraged her to be unorthodox and find her own voice. “[That] really made me say ‘I have to start my own band,’” she remembers.

Bonus Track: How Maria Schneider became her own label

In 2014 Maria Schneider testified in Congress against digital piracy. “As fast as I take my music down, it reappears again,” she told the committee, calling her efforts to police her work online “an endless Whac-A-Mole game.” You won't find her music on Spotify or Pandora, because she feels that the pennies and the exposure she gets from streaming services aren't worth the cost. Schneider tells Kurt how she started using crowd funding to pay for her albums before Kickstarter became a thing.