“Jazz vocalist Toby Schneider was auctioned off last week. Whoever bought her for the fundraiser – as well as the audience for this weekend’s March 11 concert – will hear jazz informed by Schneider’s 37-year commitment to the idiom. Schneider was listening to Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly in 1964, while her contemporaries screamed for the Beatles. I got turned on to jazz in the ’60s, when rock and roll was really taking over, Schneider said. I was off in my own little corner, scatting along with Ella (Fitzgerald).Schneider, who was born into an Indiana family she characterizes as not musical at all, received no formal training, but learned to sing from listening to record albums. Eventually, she performed in clubs in nearby Chicago, once nearly touring with The Ink Spots. Schneider left Indiana, and crisscrossed the country throughout the 1970s, living in Alaska, California, Massachusetts and Maine.I couldn’t stay in any one place long enough to put down roots, Schneider said, but I took my voice with me. Singing was the thread that ran through it all. In one place I lived, I just owned a Chick Corea album, so I listened to that. In Alaska and in Mendocino I had no electricity, so a year might go by when I couldn’t hear recorded music -but I could always sing. Schneider stayed long enough in Denver to get a degree in communications disorders at the university, but didn’t linger after graduation. She moved to Boston to begin formal voice training, but left, after a year, for the Aleutian Islands. I had this thing where I wanted to live in the wilderness, but then I also wanted to sing jazz – and you don’t have too many jazz clubs in the Aleutians, Scheider said.She does recall a gig at a pizza parlor, however. Schneider moved to Joliette, Ill., close enough to Chicago to sing in the clubs. Leaving the Midwest behind, she moved again, to San Fancisco, and there performed with Benny Green and George Cables. For two years she was featured vocalist with the Eddie Henderson Quintet. In San Francisco, Schneider married, and, when her baby was two months old, relocated to Maine.On Bainbridge she put down roots at last, but fell ill with cancer several years later. The disease, which Schneider calls a journey of another kind, changed her perspective. She let go of the hustle that goes along with trying to be a successful jazz singer, learning to wait until the right venue came along. I just don’t want to deal with smoky bars any more. I don’t want to sing in places where the help all hate jazz and the TV is on. Now I have faith that if the intention is there and the quality of music is there, it will come. “