Jenny Scheinman: A Violin in the Wild
Violinist Jenny Scheinman's double album 'All Species Parade' draws from her childhood on California's remote Lost Coast, crafting a musical celebration that honors the land, its people, and the wild diversity of nature.
Today, the Spotlight shines On violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman.
Jenny Scheinman grew up on California’s remote Lost Coast, and now she brings us music that captures the wild beauty of her roots. Her double album All Species Parade brings together jazz and folk to create something wholly original that feels like the natural world itself.
With a dream team of collaborators including Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and Julian Lage on guitars, Jenny’s violin leads us through soundscapes that honor the land, its native peoples, and all living creatures.
Jenny’s made a career working with everyone from Lucinda Williams to Lou Reed, but this project takes her back home to create what she calls “nature worship music” that refuses to be domesticated.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Jenny Scheinman’s album All Species Parade)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Jenny Scheinman’s All Species Parade from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow Jenny Scheinman on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Jenny Scheinman Finds Her Mojo on Northern California’s Lost Coast with ‘All Species Parade’
• How Jenny Scheinman’s Humboldt roots influenced new music
• ‘Crescent’: John Coltrane Quartet’s Enthralling Work
• West of the Redwoods: Historical Views from the Mattole Valley of Northern California
• Meshell Ndegeocello (feat. Brandee Younger & Julius Rodriguez), ‘Virgo’
• Jenny Scheinman All Species Parade at the Arcata Playhouse (video)
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I'm really curious about the role of place in your music more generally, but in this album, how does your location, if you can articulate it, sort of influence you and influence this as a body of work?
Jenny Scheinman: Yeah, I think that we write somewhat out of the subconscious. When I was living in cities for most of my adulthood—I left here when I was 16, so for the next couple decades, I was in the Bay Area, and then I was in New York City—I would dream about my childhood rural landscapes. I would probably write about them in some much more subconsciously influenced way: the freedom of a vista and the richness of the flora and fauna of my childhood.
But when I was really grounded here during the shutdown, it was very literal. I was really looking at the things that I'd been dreaming about for so long and appreciating them in a very direct way, appreciating just how magnificent and inspiring and good for my spirit the natural world is.
During that time, I actually broke my collarbone falling off a horse, my horse. I was cantering around this very remote area of the Lost Coast, and my horse tripped. I fell off and shattered my collarbone. It was the first time, really since I was about seven, that I was unable to play violin for an extended period of time.
It was good timing because nobody was doing gigs during the shutdown. But I took a poetry class with an old friend of the family who's one of our poet laureates of Humboldt County and very much a bioregionalist, somebody who has thought very deeply and written extensively about place and the relationship of place to community and the relationship of place to poetry—i.e., art in general. My mom dated him after she broke up with my dad, so he was kind of a father figure to me. He's a really great intellectual and poet and artist. Anyway, I took a poetry class with him for about the better part of a year and thought more directly about the answer to your question: the question of how place affects us and affects our imagination.
I'm a somewhat intuitive writer. I work hard at it, but the pieces that really end up on my albums are usually more channeled than wrought out of skill. The environment that I'm in does filter into the piece, but I don't look at an apple and write a piece about an apple.
Lawrence: Oh, right, right.
Jenny: Or look at a fault line and write about a fault line.
That poetry class really made me focus a little bit more directly on these things with my more conscious intellect. And just the immersion in this environment from the perspective of an adult really brought out the pieces. I was just really ready to celebrate my childhood landscape.
That's a very roundabout way of answering your question.
Lawrence: I'm curious about that. There's a lot in there, especially—I mean, what wonderful timing if you're going to sustain an injury like that. That was very efficient of you to make use of the lockdown in such a fashion. (laughter) But really, honestly, you're very lucky, right? If it had been a year earlier or a year or two later, it would have been, I would imagine, much more disruptive on your livelihood and your creativity.
Jenny: Yeah, it would have been devastating for that to happen. It was actually my collarbone—a more superstitious person would take that as some sort of direct hit to the place where my violin hits my body and say, "What do you do? What do you do without your violin? What is your music without the music? And what are you as an artist? What do you really think about all this?"
Lawrence: Did you have any of that existential reasoning with your injury, or is that just you applying that retroactively?
Jenny: As it is when you get injured, I think most people's response is, "Wow, I wasn't killed." There's an immediate gratitude. It's strangely illogical because everybody else is feeling sorry for you. I was so glad to have my brain, to have been able to get out of there. It was a complicated rescue, basically depending on my seven-year-old daughter who was out with me, who had to go find help, and I had to get out.
But the existential question of "What am I without what I do?" was something I thought about. I soon got surgery—I had two big surgeries—and it was pretty clear that I was going to be able to play again. And actually, it wasn't the first thing on my mind when I fell. It was like, "Wow, I'm way out in the middle of nowhere. Where is my kid, and how am I getting out of here?"
Lawrence: Yeah.
Jenny: You know, all these big challenges in life—the basic developmental stages, having kids, trying to be an artist in America, having a big injury, going through some sort of survival of something—it did deepen my commitment when I got through it. It deepened my commitment to being a musician, for sure, and my gratitude for having the skills and the life thus far. Playing so much since I was a kid, it's all I've ever done.
Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, nothing like almost losing something to come to a new appreciation for it.
Jenny: For sure. (laughter)
Lawrence: Something you said earlier that I want to pick up on is the idea of channeling the works. You said something—I'm going to badly paraphrase you—about it being more about the channeling than sort of the deliberate application of your technique or your skill.
I'm really curious about the relationship between those two. Because I'm going to make a supposition here, but I would think you can't effectively channel something that you don't have the skill to articulate. I wonder how you think about the relationship there, this sort of quasi-mystical element of composition. I'm not asking you to tell me where you think it comes from or anything like that. I'm just really interested in, do you ever receive something that you can't articulate because of either your level of skill development? Is the translation always able to pass through you?
Jenny: Yeah, that's a big question. So many things come to mind. There are artists like Bill—I've talked to Bill Frisell, my dear friend and mentor, a lot about this. He had a dream once in which he heard this huge sound which was mixed with colors and everybody he ever knew. And this was something that he's been trying to write for the last 20 years.
There's a certain ambition in trying to capture something really exquisitely beautiful that we're always—and I am always—trying to do. I guess we're always struggling with our own skill set in terms of really putting it down on paper or into the hands of a band to really make it real.
But I think also that the intersection of intuitive writing, composition, and dealing with our own skill set in terms of using our own tools to get things down is probably improvisation. That's right at the crossroads because you're working intuitively to some degree within the constraints of your own skill set and your writing. Improvisers get a whole lot of practice with that. And improvisers, not only specific to jazz improvisers—look at Beethoven. He was one of the greatest improvisers ever to live. That's what he was known for. They'd have to drag him off the piano bench after the 24th variation; he just couldn't stop.
As a player of jazz and an improviser, I write relatively simple things that my musicians can elaborate upon. And it's in that skill of elaboration or interpretation or improvisation that the core thing is really expanded to the magnificent thing that I hear in my head. And honestly, I often—I never hear it as magnificent as it is when in the hands of the players. It's an improviser/jazz phenomenon that you bring these relatively simple ideas or structures to a band and they turn it into a symphony. And it's different every time. I don't have the skills or experience to write the symphony, to write it all out. That's really a different kind of thing. And when I hear something extravagant, I know usually that it's something that my players will create with me.
Lawrence: It's really interesting to talk with people who maybe aren't as—I don't want to say knowledgeable, but I'll say it—maybe I'll say as nerdy about music as some of us can be. I'm thinking of one conversation in my life in particular where I said to somebody—you know, we were listening to, I don't even remember what, maybe it was Mozart, I can't remember—but I said, "Can you imagine that? This person wrote down all these parts, like probably alone in a room, and knew what all the sounds were, knew how to place them on the piece of paper, and then could hand them to somebody and have it played back." It's sort of astounding that our brain can do that. Now, obviously my brain can't, not everybody's brain can do that, but what an incredible functional capability, and again, met with skill and training and everything else. It's incredible.
Jenny: Totally. I mean, yesterday was Beethoven's birthday, and I spent the whole day traveling around the county playing at basically senior centers with my nerdy pianist who is totally obsessed with Beethoven. And we were blasting Beethoven in the car the whole day, and I was listening to these symphonies.
We were mostly listening to Bernstein conduct. As with any great conductor, they're really hearing these symphonies as an instrument—the orchestra is an instrument, and they're playing that instrument. So I don't think that they're really—I think they've surpassed the concept that they are separate parts that fit together.
I think at the point when you're really playing a symphony, and maybe even when you're writing a symphony—for when Beethoven was writing these things—he's hearing this singular unified sound in the same way that a pianist isn't thinking about what their left hand ring finger is doing as separate from the whole sound.
Or, you know, maybe a good example is an organ player that has stops for all the different sounds. It's one player, it's one unified sound. And what I marvel at, because of my own imaginative or skill-based limitations, is how to do that in your head. Like I can do it in the moment playing with a band. I've had that experience of hearing it unfold as a big, magnificent thing, but to be, as you say, by yourself and hear that unfold in your head—and for Beethoven to hear that in your head unfold when you actually have completely lost your sense of true hearing—is something that people have... it's astounding.
Lawrence: Yeah, you've really just given me an aha moment, which is the composer hears the finished sound in their head, and what they're actually doing when they're writing it down is breaking it apart. Like how do I hear the high end of what I'm hearing here? What do I need to write down here to recreate the high end of that? That's even more—
Okay, but let's climb out of that rabbit hole a little bit. I would say one final thing on that point: earlier this year I worked on a project with Wayne Horvitz, and he dropped a little bit of a nugget of wisdom on me as well, which helped me think about this. We were talking about the nature of improvisation, and he said, "I don't distinguish between composition and improvisation. They're just two aspects—what is improvisation, if not composition, just in real time?"
That was a big aha moment for me because I had this binary thinking about the two. My definitions were just slightly off, and I wonder, does that strike you as within the right ballpark? Is it just another mode or another manifestation of composition?
Jenny: I think you are composing when you're soloing, for sure. I do think that there are artists that approach it to varying degrees of spontaneity, and even within the classical world—sorry to go back to Beethoven so many times, but basically I'm totally immersed in Beethoven right now.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Jenny: You know, if you compare Beethoven and Haydn, I think Haydn is a composer composer, and Beethoven is an improviser composer. And I love Haydn—I'm in the middle of doing all the Haydn string quartets right now. I love Haydn, but I think those pieces are constructed more the way a house is constructed. Maybe Beethoven is constructed more the way a garden is constructed. I don't know if that's a good comparison, but there's an intuitive improviser's energy in that music that's different. And I think that for soloists, modern jazz soloists, yes, we're composing because we're choosing the next note we play.
Lawrence: The energy, yeah.
Jenny: I mean, sometimes I think jazz composers are just like—I don't know if it's very good as a composition. Somebody like Miles Davis can quote-unquote write a perfect solo, but sometimes solos are just about being in the room hanging out. And it's more like creating vibe, and maybe you could call that composition, maybe. I don't know—Philip Glass does that too. He just kind of hangs out in a thing. But yeah, they're related, but I appreciate the difference in the words.
I see what Wayne's saying, but there's something in there. There's a spectrum within which people air toward more spontaneous improvisation and more compositional thinking.
Lawrence: As part of your education, or I wonder if you still have this practice now, assuming you had it in the past, have you worked much with the practice of transcribing solos and things like that? I'm really curious about artists that do that as part of their training.
Jenny: Yeah, I transcribed a whole lot in my twenties, and I would keep doing it, but I somehow have lost the habit. Occasionally, something's just so cool that I just transcribe it. But I had all of "Crescent" around my bedroom when I was 17, and it wrapped all—I mean, I didn't have a very big bedroom, but it wrapped all the way around the room and then overlapped itself. John Coltrane's solo on "Crescent." And I transcribed a lot of guitar players.
That Coltrane thing I did because I couldn't quite get into Coltrane, and I wanted to know what people were so obsessed with. And I think I found it. That solo is so beautiful, incredible. It took a while to figure out how to play it. I don't think I ever quite really played it right, but there's a lot of notes and a lot of phrases and a lot of melodies that I didn't hear before I transcribed it.
Lawrence: That's incredible. I mean, I'd rather not say what I was up to when I was 17, but I was certainly not transcribing John Coltrane's solos, never mind "Crescent." (laughter) What brings 17-year-old you to that point? I mean, that's actually too big of a question, but John Coltrane, 17-year-old you—it's a mountain you're trying to climb. That's just... it seems very anomalous.
Jenny: I think, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I wasn't 17. I think I was more like 20.
Lawrence: Oh, that's slightly better. (laughter)
Jenny: But I did graduate from high school really young, not for reasons that I was brilliant, but just because of my odd rural childhood. So maybe you could imagine being a little bit older than that, but I was just so obsessed and so ambitious—not for a career, but just ambitious about knowledge. I really wanted to get in there.
And I also had a little bit of lingering survivor's desperation from coming out of Humboldt County drug culture. My parents weren't pot growers, but everybody else was, and there were some real casualties up here, and I just wanted to get out into the world. So I was one of those kids that come out of the middle of nowhere, and it's—I was like an immigrant.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Jenny: I was like an immigrant in civilization, as I grew up pretty out there.
Lawrence: Yeah, I say I understand, not because that's my shared experience, but I can understand that metaphor. So in the new album's dedication, you talk about several native communities. I'm curious about your relationship with these communities.
I was having a conversation with someone last night—I'm from the East Coast originally. I grew up in Connecticut. I spent about 20 years in New York, and I moved out here. The Native American experience was very abstract for me coming from the East Coast. You know, it was something that happened in the 1600s, and I was not exposed really to anything cultural. But coming out here, it's much more tangible, and it's in the iconography and the art and the place names, and you see the people more. Their causes and their issues are much more out in the open and discussed—a real eye opener for me. And so I'm just curious to learn more about your experience with the people and with the communities and anything about the traditions. I wonder if you could speak to that at all.
Jenny: Yeah, well, I think that right now, the Native communities up here are really having a resurgence. There's been a huge land back movement. And my parents—my mother and stepfather—actually are quite involved in supporting the recovery of knowledge of some of the rituals surrounding the return of the salmon to the Matole River and various other yearly rituals. They've facilitated the purchase of a few pieces of land for the native tribe in my hometown. So they're quite involved recently.
And there are some towns up here that are predominantly native, and some big reservations. The town I grew up in, which is the town of Petrolia, which is at the mouth of the Matole River, had previously been inhabited by the Matole people, for which the river is named. They were wiped out very, very quickly, and so it had almost no Native presence for me growing up. There was one Native person who had a tiny little bit of Native land. What was his name? Somebody Posh. Posh was the last name. And I remember sort of wondering about that as a young kid, wondering what it was like.
There were also shell mounds at the mouth of the river that are amazing because they're so dense with mussel and abalone and various different types of shellfish shells that they can weather hundreds of years of changing sand formations and all sorts of things. So they're still there, and we used to go down there a lot.
So the idea of native culture in the Matole was something I thought a lot about, but didn't have much experience with compared to towns where there were tribal gatherings all the time and that kind of thing.
I guess in the dedication, what I intend to include is all species, meaning all plants and animals that do live in this area and have lived in this area. And to make sure that nature isn't something that is separate from humans, that we are part of that. And in that, the full history of our species in this area—to do that, I wanted to specifically include people that once lived here or still do live here but really had a relationship with this land before white colonials basically took over.
Lawrence: I'm not well-versed or well-read enough in the philosophy of ecology, but that notion that seems to be gaining traction—or the school of thought that it's a mistake when we think about humans and nature, as opposed to everything we do is part of the natural world. Like, we're not separate, and that perception of us being separate is the root of a lot of the problems when it comes to feelings of dominion over the natural world, or this tension between human development in the natural world. It's a flawed first principle that humans aren't part of nature.
Jenny: Yeah, and I think it's at the root of a lot of human feelings of alienation as well. Not only does it lead to destruction of our own habitat, but it leads to a destruction of the things that we really need to survive, which is this communication with the natural world—the things we get from it, which are more than apples and coal and wind power.
Lawrence: Could you talk a little bit about the structure of the album, specifically the sort of suite-like nature of it? Did you tie these compositions together to arrive at that format, or was the conception of it always there for you?
Jenny: Well, there's two formats. There's a CD and there's a vinyl. The vinyl gives it four sides, each side containing its own little personality. And the second side of the vinyl is actually a suite. It's the Jarougigi Suite, or the All Species Parade Suite. And that's very much dedicated to this area and to the Native people in this area.
Jarougigi being the name for the area which is now the county seat of Humboldt County and now has a very colonial name, Eureka—"I found it." And had been Jarougigi, very beautiful, three Js, J-A-R-O-U-G-I-G-I, very mellifluous. And also, I think it roughly means "a place to sit and rest." And it's right on the bay, so it's very beautiful.
And that leads into a sort of Ellingtonian kind of improvisation featuring Carmen and Kenny—Carmen Staaf, the piano player, and Kenny Wollesen. And then it goes into the "All Species Parade," which is like a party for everyone and a big celebration of life.
Lawrence: It's a big piece of music.
Jenny: Yeah, so if you mean that, that was always kind of a suite. I played this music before I recorded it, and those three pieces were always in a sequence. Kind of the gravity of the first piece is contrasted by the grooves and the parade of the last piece, and the middle section is sort of a reflective moment. The suite idea was very much influenced by Duke Ellington. I was listening to a lot of Duke Ellington suites around the time that I wrote this music.
The rest of the album in terms of the structure—do you sort of mean the order? Is that what you sort of mean by that, the order of the tunes?
Lawrence: Yeah, I think so. And as a listener, the way it landed for me—because I listened, I did not listen on a physical format, I listened to, I guess, streaming, which would be more like the CD experience—it was almost like a nested doll type of experience in terms of the suites being part of the bigger whole. Because obviously when you listen that way all the way through, it's just one listening experience.
I think it just landed for me as thematically consistent, I guess, would be the way to say it, even though the music spans—there's some stylistic movement, I think, is fair to say, right? Like there's a lot going on across this record, but it always feels in context. I'm not articulating—we're getting back into the realm of the mysticism of it all, I suppose, and words don't serve well, but you conjured a very specific experience for me, I guess, would be my comment.
Jenny: Yeah, one of the things that I'm notoriously slow with is sequencing, very slow. Originally, I was going to start the whole album with the last tune, with "Nocturne for 2020," and I had this whole sequence.
It's 72 minutes of music, and there's one song that did not end up on the album, not because of the length, which would have been an issue, but because it just never quite found itself. But for a long time, I was dealing with like 80 minutes of music, and my first proposal to my manager was, "Hey, let's do two albums. The first one is called All Species Parade, and it's more grounded in the earth. Second one is called The Mighty Pacific, and it's more grounded in water and air."
She said, "No, the industry doesn't work like that, Scheinman. I want one amazing album." And so I had that phrase, "one amazing album." Okay, okay, Liz, I'm going to make you one amazing album. I looked at this 80 minutes of music knowing a CD is 72 minutes, and I tried to get a narrative or a story or a logic to these tunes.
Luckily, a lot of these tunes are really long, so I wasn't trying to sequence 20 tunes. That's really hard because they all, even apart from the length, a tune has its own kind of personality. All I had was 11 tunes, now I have 10 tunes.
I ended up then talking a lot with the head of the label, who I love, Kevin Calabro, and we decided first that he was going to be willing to do a double vinyl, and that he wanted that sequence to be the same sequence as the CD, presented very differently because of the four-side nature of vinyl.
Then I went out on the road and I played it for a bunch of people, and my very, very brilliant friend Robbie Fulks, who's from a totally different world of music—he's a country singer and a comedian and brilliant intellectual—I said, "Sequence this thing for me, Robbie, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do." And he came up with "Ornette" first. I had never thought of that, totally never thought of that. And he sequenced the whole thing. I made one shift, and it was done. I really had a hard time sequencing it. But he really heard it.
I now hear "Ornette Goes Home," the first song on the album, as a kind of introduction to the band. Everybody takes a solo. Everybody has plenty of time. It brings in the celebratory nature of the whole album. That's one of the things you can do in framing an album—it's like the thesis or whatever. And had I started with "Nocturne," it would have been a much more serious thesis.
That is in there, but the whole album itself, I didn't really want to be too grave. I wanted an element of parade and an element of appreciation and frolic, plain old frolic and growth and variety and diversity. All of that stuff I wanted in there. And I feel like "Ornette" brought all of us in with all our different perspectives or diversity of perspective as improvisers.
And then "The Bear," the bear tune, is also somewhat—you know, it's got a little bit of comedy in it. It's a little bit understandable. And it brings in one big animal first, the big mammals. Then we've got the suite—then we dive into the Jarougigi suite, which is a serious idea.
Then that third side, which is the third part of these four sections, there's a lot of Nels Cline in it. We have "House of Flowers," which has this kind of mystical, swarmy, swirly thing that Nels and I do together. And then the one after that is—oh, does it start with "Shut Down Stomp"? I can't remember what it starts with. It's three tunes. It's basically "House of Flowers," "Shut Down Stomp," and "The Cape."
And now I'm forgetting what the order is, actually. But it's those three together. "The Cape" is the surf tune, it's the most bawdy, it's the most spunky. It's kind of an outlier, maybe, in the whole sequence. If it hadn't been in there, which was suggested by a few people, the whole thing would have been a little more tamped down, and I feel like that one really pushes it into freedom. And then the end is reflective and kind of serious, in a way, and I mean what I say.
Lawrence: Something that really stands out for me is the use of the different guitarists. You know, it would be one thing if there was just a guitar player in the studio ensemble, but it's very specific to have these three different players. I'm really curious—I feel like if you say each of the guitar player's names to me, it conjures something. I don't want to say specific—that's unfair—but I have ideas about what each of these players does. How do you think about them as sonic tools in your toolbox? What do you go to each of those players for?
Jenny: You're right. It is specific on this album. I went to Julian for a specific thing, which was acoustic guitar. It's not the only thing Julian does. If I say Julian Lage, I don't know if everybody thinks of acoustic guitar, but it's something he can do, and I love it. He can play in a rhapsodic, muscular way on acoustic guitar, steel-string acoustic guitar. And there are three songs where he plays acoustic guitar. On two of them, he takes these really tremendous solos.
Musically, one of the things we talked about before recording was our shared early love of John McLaughlin in the Shakti albums, the acoustic guitar, also Django Reinhardt—or that kind of tactile, physical world feel you get from a pick on a steel string on an acoustic guitar, very different than an electric guitar. It's harder to get that real physicality, and in this world I'm building of the natural world, I really wanted that physicality in there. So he's in there kind of for that.
Bill is on the entire record. He's really in the band. Bill expands everything, many dimensions. It's just his sound and his sense. And I'm so—you know, I've been playing with him for my whole life. I love playing melodies with him, and he just finds his way into my compositions so intuitively. We have so much language together, and he has so much history with Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen. There's just a lot of non-thinking that goes there that is just clear communication.
Nels, I've also known for a really long time and I've played with a lot. I really brought him in for two songs. One is the mystical swarm thing.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's basically what he—if you said to me, "Describe him," I don't know if I could come up with better words. (laughter)
Jenny: Yeah, it's this like energy ball. And he does a type of—like, I play unison melodies with Bill, I can get into unison energy with Nels because he just goes, he just really goes there. And the tune that we do that on, which is "House of Flowers," is also a sister tune to the very first song on my album Mischief and Mayhem. That song is called "A Ride with Paulie Jennings," and that is an album and a band I have with Nels, so I wanted him in there on the sister song to that tune.
Then the other tune that he's featured on is "The Cape," which is the surf tune. Not only can he really rock, he really has, can get, be wild. He's also from California—he's my southern state-mate brother. He knows those beaches. He knows the California sense of freedom and lack of self-consciousness and beautiful women. (laughter) Just like physicality. It's another physicality thing. The kind of uncivilized West Coast.
Lawrence: Yeah, the end of the earth.
Jenny: The end of the earth.
Lawrence: That's incredible. Thank you for sharing all that. I'm really curious about your work with Tucker Martine as the mixing engineer. Because the record has such a—wow, I was about to say without thinking—it has a very West Coast vibe to me in terms of its openness. Like there's a lot of—it's a spacious record, right? For how much instrumentation is going on at times, it never feels dense. And I feel like there's a lot of room to breathe. And it has a certain accessibility to it because of that.
It seems like from talking with you, and having never spoken with you before this, that there's a lot of intentionality in your approach to this work. You know, even you articulating about how to a certain extent you worked in and around the formats and you worked to make the "one great album," and just the notion of intention. And so I'm curious what goes into picking such an important member of the team—like, how were you aware of Tucker? Was that your decision? Did somebody suggest that pairing? How does something like that come to pass for you?
Jenny: I was very lucky in this album. I asked my dream team and everybody said yes. And everybody was available. I mean, that's really a lot of it. I had to wait a while for Tucker because he was busy, and this album would have come out a lot earlier had I not waited.
I've known Tucker for a really long time. He's mixed a number of Bill Frisell's albums. He also mixed Mischief and Mayhem, and he also recorded and mixed my album with Bill Frisell and Brian Blade, which is called The Littlest Prisoner, which is actually an album that I sing on. It's a bunch of songs, and I love Tucker.
Tucker's a really interesting engineer. Only recently does he have the ability—did he choose to engage the ability to save things and be able to return to them, which is a part of engineering that's been the standard for quite a while. But he stayed for a very long time with the old school approach to mixing that was performative, where basically you start it and you perform the mix with your hands on the faders. And then if you don't get it, you got to start over and do it all again.
So that's a very different approach than the modern approach, which is go through, work on a part, then work on the next part, then send it to your artist and work, return to it three months later and fix a little thing. It's much more sort of like a musician or a conductor or something like that.
He can return to things now, but his approach is very—I relate to it as a performer, and he gets very deeply focused on it the way you have to if you don't know if you're going to be able to return to it. And I could have just sent him the tracks. Most people just send their tracks to engineers these days, and they do their thing. I instead went up and treated myself to a week of laying on his couch reading books and listening to his mix, and it was so much fun. He's so good, and he was definitely my first choice as an engineer.
He is on the West Coast, which meant that I could easily go visit him, but it also means he has some context for whatever it is we're trying to conjure. I guess I want to clarify that the album isn't just about the West Coast. It's about the diversity of nature and an appreciation of that. But it was written on the West Coast, and for me, it's working with those kinds of—that's what I know most deeply.
So, yeah, Tucker—he knows song very well. I think he doesn't do as much jazz as he used to, but he does a lot more songwriters, and that's pretty deep in my writing as well, like a real appreciation of the lyric and the song and the story, even when it's in instrumental music. So he really brings that out.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. That's really beautiful.
Jenny: So when we part ways in the next couple of minutes, what are you going to go listen to next?
Lawrence: What am I going to listen to? Well, I'm packing up to go to Florida for a family wedding, and I will put on Meshell Ndegeocello, Virgo, because it's damn good. And it's also great packing music. Yeah. And then I'm playing with a circus for two weeks to pay for my terrible quintet habit. I've been traveling around with a quintet, and it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous business proposition to travel with a quintet, but I'm so into this album and I want people to hear it. It has to have piano, has to have guitar, it has to have bass, has to have drums. And I guess I got to be there.
So anyway, so I'm going to play with a circus for two weeks, make some money and hang out with some clowns. And then I'm going to New York and doing more of these gigs. And then the spring I have a whole bunch of All Species Parade gigs. I'm kind of back at work. I was a mom a lot, I still am, but then the COVID hit, and now I feel like my kids are at an age where I can kind of work a little more, and they're not left in the lurch as much.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. Thanks for making time. I very much appreciate it. I've so much enjoyed listening to the record and hope you have safe travels to Florida and beyond.
Jenny: Thank you so much. It was fun talking with you.
Jenny Scheinman
Artist
Jenny Scheinman, acclaimed violinist and composer, for many years a stalwart of the New York jazz and creative music scenes, returned to her native Humboldt County, California in 2012. There she has continued her artistic evolution, as heard on her recent albums Here on Earth (“packed with moments of joyous ecstasy and wind-swept solemnity” – Downbeat), Parlour Game, a co-lead collaboration with Allison Miller (“The band levitates and feels grounded both” – PopMatters), and The Littlest Prisoner, an album of songs in trio with Bill Frisell and Brian Blade (“self-assured, made with a deft, steady hand.” – New York Times).
For years, Scheinman nursed the idea of a musical homage to Humboldt, in particular the area known as the Lost Coast, a remote, earthquake- and mudslide-prone region of coastal northern California, where she was raised. She considered the project from many angles. She wrote a song cycle based on the “crusty characters” from her hometown and sketched out a surrealist multimedia project based on the county’s namesake, Alexander Von Humboldt. She collaborated with filmmaker Ai Aiwane on a video installation about the Mattole River (Cojo Come Home) and immersed herself in the sounds and cultural history of the region, with hopes of conjuring, in music, the extraordinary diversity of life in the Pacific Northwest. Her epic new release, All Species Parade, is the result of these meditations.
The all-original program is brought to life over the course of a double album, by pianist Carmen Staaf, guitar icons Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and Julian… Read More
