Aural Robert

Most of the provocative and charismatic popular music made today is an unclassifiable mixture—a hybrid of whatever styles, sounds, and instruments happen to move its creators. Violinist Jenny Scheinman not only composes multi-hued music that is singularly her own, but she lives in two very different musical worlds: the progressive world of jazz, and the more song- and tradition-based environs of Americana.

Scheinman's latest solo album, All Species Parade, released in October 2024 on the Royal Potato Family label, is a classic example of her unique vision and chameleon-like ability to blend seamlessly into disparate musical contexts, with nods to both jazz and Americana. Living and working in two musical worlds not only allows her to make a living as a professional musician—no easy feat—but it also fits what she repeatedly refers to in conversation as "perspective."

"I have people say to me, 'I just noticed that some of the dates on your tour are listed as double bills with [Americana stalwarts] Mary Gauthier and Robbie Fulks. Isn't that kind of strange?'" she explained in an interview from her home in northern California. "But I'm interested in both"—both jazz and Americana. "When I head off with Robbie Fulks, I come back full of ideas and music, and I feel like I'm expressing myself. And yet, there's a freedom in instrumental jazz that I also need in my life. Giving my musicians so much freedom is a big part of my writing and my way of engaging with them."

Her two musical personalities can engender confusion in some audience members. "Maybe I should change my last name for one of them," she says with a half-serious chuckle.

Another split in Scheinman's art is between her instrument and voice; she's best known as a violinist, but several of her recordings, including her 2014 outing The Littlest Prisoner on Columbia, feature her surprisingly accomplished and evocative singing. "I don't consider myself a jazz singer. I didn't develop those skills. And I haven't really figured out how to totally connect these two things"—violin and singing—"in my songwriting," she continues. "The singing thing for me is not about being an instrumentalist with my voice. It's a little bit more about the words. I basically write what I hear. And when you hear something with words, it engages your brain in a very different way. It can be really satisfying to say something concrete."

There's one more duality in Scheinman's life: her bicoastal presence. A native of Humboldt County in northern California, she moved to New York in 1999 and became a distinctive part of the new jazz scene, holding down a weekly gig at Barbès in Brooklyn and playing with a wide cross-section of players including Marc Ribot and Norah Jones. Then in 2012, she returned to northern California's Lost Coast. That change, along with becoming a first-time parent, are the experiences and emotions she draws on in All Species Parade. Add to that a desire to express her constant sense of wonder inspired by the dramatic landscape of extreme northern California.

"My hometown, Petrolia, California, is super remote. It's the western-most part of the North American coast, and the water is super cold and turbulent. There's all this intense geologic stuff going on. It feels far from urban centers. It feels far from the friends that I developed, my colleagues. It was a hard transition, especially when added to becoming a parent.

"And yet, maybe it's not as different from New York as it may seem, because there's an ambitious intensity in the overall landscape of this area. That's what I kind of came to when trying to find a way to write about it. I feel this album is the most expansive jazz album I've made. We're all playing and really conversing, all the stuff that jazz can do."

At the center of All Species Parade—along with a rhythm section of pianist Carmen Staaf, bassist Tony Scherr, and drummer Kenny Wollesen—is a diverse trio of distinguished guitarists: Nels Cline, Julian Lage, and Scheinman's longtime collaborator and friend, Bill Frisell (footnote 1).

"I've had such a lucky life of playing with such amazing guitar players. Bill is on every track; he's the house band. He's my mentor, collaborator, and is just like ... my guy. Nels, who I have known almost as long, comes in to elevate and bring his crazy fairy-dust stuff to tracks like 'House of Flowers' and 'The Cape.' While he's been in New York for a while now, he's really a California spirit. He's got that surf punk, open Pacific Ocean liberty of the West Coast. This is the first time I have recorded with Julian. He's rhapsodic."

The gorgeous-sounding All Species Parade was recorded in Brooklyn's Bunker Studio, with Eli Crews recording. The album was mixed by producer/engineer Tucker Martine and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound. It is available as a CD, streaming at hi-rez, and on a 180gm two-LP set.

"I would say that as a jazz artist, I tend to spend more time mixing than a lot of people. We don't just lay it down live and let it be what it is—set the levels and let it go. I like depth in the sound. I like foreground, background. I don't like too much isolation, but the violin can be tricky to record, so I was in an iso booth. There are a couple of tracks that Bill added a little bit of stuff to. And then Nels was added later. Very little was fixed; it's very much a jazz recording in that nearly everything was recorded live."

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Footnote 1: Scheinman was featured on Frisell's All We Are Saying, our Recording of the Month for December 2011.