Maria, Maria.

I can't really go on any farther without writing about my experience with the guest artist that first year I went to Banff. If there was only one thing that I would be allowed to remember about that time, it would have to be those few days Maria Schneider spent with us.

There was a fairly palpable sense of anticipation in the days leading up to her taking the helm. Pianist Michelle Grégoire for one, seemed be counting down the minutes, despite really digging what was going on with the rest of the workshop. We had performed some of Michelle's compositions that I thought were just great, in fact I'm listening to our performance of them as I write this. I recall hanging out with some of the band in Michelle's room and she was keeping a couple of Maria's cds on her night table in anticipation of working with her.

Maria was already there, spending her time in one of the artists' cabins, doing some composing. She had been the guest artist the previous year and there were some repeat participants in the orchestra, ready to pick up where they had left off.

On the first day, she told us some of her background, particularly her experiences with mentors Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, then we started working through some of her charts. It was some of most challenging music I had ever played. The only thing that rivalled it was working up a performance of Barry Guy's Witch Gong Game II/10 - a huge graphic score of exquisite beauty and torture.

It struck me immediately how Maria's arranging broke down the standard blocky sectional style of arranging. It felt like there were 20 separate lines weaving together. Often nobody else in the sax section was playing my phrases, the connections would be weaving all over the orchestra. You really had to be listening to everyone else all the time. And there always was a propulsive sense of forward motion in every single line she wrote, even if there were separated notes spaced over several bars. This is very evident in Gil Evans' writing and Maria insisted each of us play that way, shaping and moving every phrase.

Her ears are huge. She seemed to hear everything all the time. It felt like she picked up on every clam I hit. No matter how complex the music was getting, if I forgot to shape a phrase, as she was turning and conducting, she would catch my eye. And everybody was feeling this same way.

Once we got to the point where she felt we had enough music for the concert, she really worked the band over. I was in heaven, and totally overwhelmed. I was spending every free minute I could practicing, and would stay in the practice room past 2:00am, until I started falling asleep with my horn in my mouth.

Then there was the matter of doubles. In her own orchestra in New York, most of the sax section doubles on everything imaginable, including oboe, english horn, bass flute and basset horn. She would have written for a contrabass sarrusaphone if some in the band had one.

I was switching between second tenor sax and bari sax. Calgarian Keith Krushel (of Swinging Bovines Sax Quartet fame) and I found it advantageous to switch chairs on different charts. We shared my flute. I hadn't brought my bari, just my mouthpiece, but a brand new top of the line Yamaha bari had been brough up from Calgary. It was a sweet horn.

I ended up with the bass clarinet parts - I must have lost the coin toss. The music department had also brought up a beautiful brand new Selmer model 65 low C. They don't get any better than that unless you are a misguided Buffet snob. I later learned from Francois Houle that he was the very first person to have played it there, brand spanking new, and I would have been the second. I would have dearly loved to have been able to take that fabulous instrument home with me.

The problem was that I really couldn't play it. To that point in my life, I had prided myself that I had never as much as played one note on a regular clarinet. I played a little bass clarinet in Vancouver with the Douglas College Nite Band, but it was almost all goose eggs, very simple stuff. Now here I was playing the most fiendishly difficult and beautiful music I could ever have imagined, in front of the composer, who just happened to have the hearing acuity of a bat.

I practised the thing every moment I could. I knew I had a fantastic instrument in my hands, the only thing lacking was me. Even though I have no problems playing my bass sax, a low C bass clarinet requires a particularly long extension of your right arm to cover the keys properly. After only a couple of hours, it really got to hurt, and by performance time, my arm was killing me. I tried every position possible and very little relief was achieved.

But by this time I was completely in Maria's thrall and would have gladly drunk the proverbial Jonestown Kool-Aid, had she asked. I played through the growing pain and practised every waking hour that I had free.

One day, between sessions, Maria grabbed me as I walked by the main rehearsal hall. She would tell anybody who cared to listen that she was not much of a pianist. But here she was, almost beside herself with excitement. She said, "Listen to this!". She was sight-reading a Hindemith piano sonata (or was it a concerto?), which she had found in Banff's extensive music library, something she had been searching for for years. She was reading this down pretty damn well in my opinion, AND analyzing it on the fly. "Listen to how this chord works with this one!" She was in heaven, was soaking it all in, and had to share that moment with someone. I was the lucky stiff passing by.

Two pieces in that concert program stand out for me. The first was her new suite Three Romances, which later showed up on her Grammy-winning album Concert in the Garden. The first movement, Choro Dancado is achingly beautiful and is one of my favourite pieces to this day. The bass clarinet part is quite challenging and it took everything I had to pull it off. I resolved that I would never get stuck in this position again, that I had to learn my doubles. Last year, I decided to forego attending Banff and instead bought a bass clarinet of my own, an instrument that I now love to play pain-free.

This movement also required one of the percussionists to play a pandeiro, which is the Brazilian take on a tambourine, but so much more. It intrigued me enough to search one out when I got back home. I eventually took pandeiro lessons with the phenomenal Celso Machado, so I have Maria to thank for that as well.

To be honest, I can't remember playing a note of the second movement, Pas de Deux. I can't even tell you what instrument I played. All I can remember was that it was the only easy piece in the whole program, mostly backgrounds to an extended solo.

The third movement is also very lovely, Danca Illusoria. It was another very challenging piece of music to play.

The other composition of hers that remains in my heart was the centrepiece of the evening, Hang Gliding, a brilliant piece she wrote about her experience of riding a hang glider over Rio de Janeiro. For starters, it was in 11/8, about 13 minutes long and almost totally through-composed. No convenient repeats, no Basie-like sectional work, always original, and pushing everyone in the orchestra. I was playing the Yamaha bari and recall there was a passage with a high G in the middle of a beautiful moving line. Seeing as how the natural range of my Selmer horn stops at high F, this was going to be a challenge. I have never seen a high G written in the hundreds of other bari charts that I've played over the years. I'll be honest - in the end I scuffled through that passage, close but no cigar.

But the real challenge for me was a passage towards the very end of the piece, where the bari sax had the lead in a line that led to the final climax of the piece. Maria was on my case about that passage - it was crucial and had to be played cleanly yet with a lot of emotion. I was having trouble with it right up to the final rehearsal. It was only in the very final rehearsal that the piece really came together as a whole, and she started dancing while we played. I immediately got extremely emotional. Bill Mahar and Kent Sangster played brilliant solos, and by the time I got to that crucial passage, I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, not particularly primo sax technique, but I got through it, and played it pretty well the way she wanted.

Here I was in the best band I had ever played in, with some of the finest musicians in the country, playing the most gorgeous and difficult music imaginable, and being led by this beautiful and amazingly talented woman. I was so grateful to Hugh and Lorae for having invited me up there, something I couldn't have imagined only 5 days earlier. It was too much to bear.

The rehearsal wound up after we finished that piece, and I hung back to talk with her. I was still so choked up that I really couldn't communicate that well. She initially thought I was upset about that passage, but I eventually got across my deepest and profoundest gratitude for having the privelege of sharing those days with her.

I could not listen to the opening bars of Hang Gliding for months afterward without getting a lump in my throat. That rehearsal was the very day that my life as a musician irrevocably changed. There was no going back.

If you haven't done so, please visit Maria's website, one of the better musician's websites in my opinion. You can hear some samples of her music on the home page, just turn up your speakers.

At the top of the page is a picture of the two of us backstage on the night of the concert. You can find more at Michelle Grégoire's website. Michelle was also one of our orchestra who was deeply affected by her time with Maria.

We were living in a state of grace.