Jenny Scheinman: California Dreaming
“I feel that there is a non-specificness about instrumental music that invites the listener to reflect on the mystery and magnificence of nature,” Jenny Scheinman observes, while describing the origins of her latest album, All Species Parade.
The renowned violin player and composer has long bridged musical realms. As both a band leader and accompanist, she has explored jazz forms with Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Jason Moran, Allison Miller and many others. However, she is also an adroit vocalist, with an affinity for writing Americana songs.
Her new release celebrates the physical environment of Northern California where she grew up and now calls home. She explains, “All Species Parade is a dedication not only to the present biodiversity of this area but there are also songs and thoughts in it that are honoring the species that have been—all species past and present, including the species that have gone extinct, the ones that are in danger of being extinct, and by extension, the people species, the human species that have been impacted by colonial expansion.”
As for her decision to explore this rich and nuanced subject through jazz, Scheinman remarks, “I have most of an album written with songs about this area, and in fact, my previous two albums of singing music talk about this area a lot. It’s an ongoing theme in my writing with words. But those are somewhat specific. They’re stories. They’re about characters. They’re about specific situations. I think that instrumental music is more open-ended and non specific, and in that, a more expansive way of invoking or evoking things.”
Expansive is also an apt term to describe the totality of All Species Parade, which spans two LPs, presenting 10 songs and 72 minutes of music. The arrangements on Scheinman’s prior instrumental releases have been more concise, but she made the decision to open things up a bit.
“That’s something I’m really proud of on this album,” she says. “I feel like I found a way to balance my talents as a composer and my tendencies as a composer, which are for songs, melody and somewhat stable composition, with the kind of free-range approach that jazz musicians can take. We’ve all been playing together long enough, and we all share a certain reverence for the tune itself, that we don’t lose the tune in the improvisations. I had been thinking about that for a long time and, finally, this record kind of gets to it.”
The players on All Species Parade share a familiarity as well as an elevated artistry. The core group features guitarist Bill Frisell, bass player Tony Scherr, drummer Kenny Wollesen and Carmen Staaf on piano. In addition, Julian Lage and Nels Cline bring their acoustic and electric guitar facilities to the project.
Scheinman first performed with Frisell over two decades ago in his own band, and she reflects, “Bill is in the sound of every track. I can’t not write for him. He’s been such an influence in my life. The way I write melodies and the way I hear the possibilities in music have so much to do with him. He is also so connected to Tony and Kenny, which was an obvious sound in my head.”
Cline’s invitation was facilitated, in part, by his geographic background. Scheinman details, “This stuff is about biodiversity in general, but it’s also specifically Californian. Nels is like my Southern California brother. I’ve known him for a long time, and we have a way together of really getting into these twirly, ecstatic, sort of mind-blend, unison energy clouds. I brought him in for ‘House of Flowers,’ which gets into that near the end. It’s a sister tune to ‘A Ride with Polly Jean,’ which was the first track on an album I made with Nels about a decade ago [Mischief & Mayhem]. Then the other tune is ‘The Cape,’ which is a surf tune. I had to have Nels on there for the pummeling waves.”
She notes that Lage “came in for a really specific acoustic guitar role. The early iteration of the music included acoustic steel-string guitar, and this was key to one part of the sound. I was probably reaching back to my early days playing a lot of Django Reinhardt music, and also a real love at a certain influential time in my life of John McLaughlin’s steel-string acoustic playing and sarod playing. That, to me, was really connected to a way of evoking the strengths and diverse aspects of nature. It felt real; it felt tactile.”
As All Species Parade unfolds, it operates on a number of levels. Opener “Ornette Goes Home” presents the core quintet, providing an opportunity for everyone to introduce themselves with a solo. The second side of the album not only advances the larger theme but also includes a three-song suite that honors Duke Ellington. Scheinman says of “The Cape” on side C: “I really didn’t want an album about nature to look like a pretty picture of a landscape. I didn’t want it to be super civilized. I wanted to have wilderness in it, and ‘The Cape’ is the wilderness of the ocean.”
The release closes with “Nocturne for 2020” and she acknowledges, “It’s definitely a recognition of our mortality, which I was thinking about a lot during the pandemic and also, by extension, a recognition of extinguishing species. But when I recorded the tune, I really wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just sad. It has a melody that could be played kind of sad, and I said into the mic: ‘Don’t play sad, play fierce.’ I really wanted the sense of survival, resilience and hope that comes with that strength and grit.”
After Scheinman shares this thought, the violinist circles back to the animating principle of All Species Parade, as she indicates, “I came to this idea of honoring, celebrating, rejoicing, magnifying and reflecting this area through a kind of music that in some ways mirrors the dynamics of the natural world. It might do all that more literally than any of the other genres I had been entertaining as a means to make an album about this area. It took a while for me to get there because I had come to think of jazz, like many people do, as urban music, which within American society it is. So I associate it with an urban environment, and this is a very rural environment. However, outside of that particular perspective on jazz, the actual inner workings of a band and the way the music works is very similar to an ecosystem.”
