The Grammy Award-winning Maria Schneider Orchestra will perform at 8 p.m. tomorrow at Eisenhower Auditorium.

Chatting on the phone from her Vermont hotel room, Maria Schneider revealed that she always imagined winning a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Miss America title.

To date she's won one out of the three accolades.

Schneider and her orchestra won a Grammy for best large jazz ensemble album for the record Concert in the Garden.

"Concert in the Garden is the album that I felt most proud of musically," composer and arranger Schneider said. "It has more space, it's more gentle, musically it's the most cohesive. I think I like it because it doesn't try to be something. And I loved the sound of it. The band just played so beautifully."

Concert in the Garden also raised some eyebrows in the music industry because it was the first album to win a Grammy without having been released to retail markets.

The album was sold in limited quantities through ArtistShare, a Web site that gives artists an alternative to mainstream record companies.

"Record profits are split everywhere and there's nothing left for the artist," Schneider said, "and I was tired of that, after investing so much of my own money in them. Under ArtistShare, I managed to pay for my $90,000 record and make it back again."

In addition to selections from Concert in the Garden, tomorrow's audience will hear "The 'Pretty' Road," a piece co-commissioned by Penn State's Center for the Performing Arts (CPA).

Several people from the CPA saw one of Schneider's concerts in New York, loved what they saw and then heard she was looking for sponsors to commission a new piece, said Laura Sullivan, a spokeswoman for CPA.

"[CPA] is dedicated to commissioning new works whenever possible," Sullivan said. "And we had never co-commissioned a jazz piece. We've done dance and other areas, but not jazz."

The Maria Schneider Orchestra is the latest in a series of jazz-themed events at Eisenhower this season.

"The Maria Schneider Orchestra is very different from the [Nov. 18] Billie Holiday concert and will be different from the [upcoming] Jazz at Lincoln Center's Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra," Sullivan said. "There are people who love anything jazz, and there are single-ticket purchasers who are very specific about the type they prefer, like big band."

Corey Wallace (junior-music education and performance), who plays for Penn State's Centre Dimensions ensemble and is the president of the Penn State Jazz Club, said he is planning to attend the upcoming concert.

Wallace compares Schneider's music to that of Dave Holland, a composer to whom he recently started listening.

"This concert is a great way for me to get into her music," Wallace said. "I was into more traditional styles, and she's more contemporary. I'm used to swing, not necessarily the era of swing, but jazz that has that certain element to it. You can snap your fingers to it, and you can't always do that to her music. Hopefully, I'll learn from it and work it into my own compositions."