Jenny Scheinman Brings the Experience of Awe article @ All About Jazz

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Bill Frisell has said, “A song isn’t just a sort of mathematical puzzle for her; it has real emotional meaning. She can play out or free or whatever, but you always hear that center, that melody thing, which is so important.”

So, go ahead and play you wild violinist until beauty and wildness and longing are one.

All About Jazz: Good morning, Jenny, I just got back from feeding our horses.

Jenny Scheinman: That’s okay. I just got out of bed. Do you know that I rode a horse to school every day till I was out of high school? And my daughter, who is 12, is totally into horses. She’s an incredible rider. My parents have horses and they have cattle. They have a ranch, and we work with them there. Right now. I just have one horse for my daughter. She’s a Jim Connor rider, and she does cattle work. She did this very cool thing this weekend. She was in this medieval festival as a mounted archer. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that like in old movies, but you ride with no hands because both hands are on the bow and arrow. And in this performance, you canter your horse down this lane and then shoot at various things, including something that’s shot up in the air and you try and hit it. It’s pretty spectacular. They’re all decked out in medieval outfits.

AAJ: It sounds intense and difficult. I don’t believe I could do that from the ground, never mind on a horse. I have enough problems roping when we do ranch sorting or cutting horse competitions.

JS: Yeah, we do that. We have a hundred head of cattle, or my folks do, so we have to do that three times a year. We have to sort ’em out in these corrals.

AAJ: All Species Parade has much to do with the area you were raised in, not a commune but not exactly normal suburbia either.

JS: This area has the redwoods. It has the beach. It has cattle land. It has the coastal scrub, It has a tremendous amount of rainfall which creates mudslides. And lots of earthquakes because these three tectonic plates are all crashing together. It’s active and dynamic absolutely. The disasters around the vicinity are usually fires because of all the underbrush. The governor has said they are going to do controlled fires, but we haven’t seen any. The ranchers will do it, though.

AAJ: Is there any earthquake activity near you?

JS: Oh my God. There’s constantly little earthquakes, and there have been some really big ones. There were two last year that were significant and caused some damage, but I missed both of them. I grew up on a homestead, real rural, as you can imagine, riding a horse to school. But now I live in the nearest college town. Arcata is a town of 20,000 people. It’s a very small town, but it’s not, you know?

AAJ: How far did you have to ride to get to school?

JS: Elementary school was about five miles one way.

AAJ: More importantly, what did you do with a horse once you got to school?

JS: I just tied it up. It had water. I put it in a corral during high school. For a little while there was a school bus, so I’d only ride three and a half miles. Then I’d tie it up near where the school bus picked us up, and it would stay there until I got back and went home.

AAJ: I read a little bit about the fellow that settled Humboldt County, Alexander Von Humboldt. He was a polymath, one of the founders of modern geology and did a lot of exploration in the Amazon. Quite an interesting character!

JS: There’s a great book about him called The Invention of Nature. It’s a big book and a really good one. I recommend it totally.

AAJ: You did a movie Avenue with the Giants, Isn’t that the name of the road that goes through the redwoods?

JS: It is. The movie itself has two locations: One is flashbacks to the Holocaust, basically. And the other half is set in Marin County.

AAJ: Nature appears to be an important subject to you.

JS: Well, I grew up in the country, but I then lived in cities until I was in my early thirties. I lived in the Bay Area and then to New York City. When I was pregnant with my second kid, I moved back out here which is very rural, and it was such a shock to be surrounded by this much fresh air. I thought I was going to overdose. On the record, I was looking for a way to talk about and really pay homage to this area. I tried it from a couple different angles, and I found that jazz being one of the most dynamic formats of music did it justice. It’s tremendously interactive and focused on growth, the growth of a solo. You’re using these relatively small springboards of songs, exploring and expanding them. It’s in some ways my native language and music. I was really happy to have found a way to talk about the diversity and exuberance of nature through jazz and with such a tremendous group of people. It was really a fun session. We dove in with full trust and just the tremendous skill and talent of everybody involved. It made a pretty dynamic album.

AAJ: You can imagine a picture of a walk through the woods, and you’re on a kind of path that leads through the woods that perhaps has been walked on before. And then there’s various places you could go, almost as a metaphor for jazz. Jazz in nature.

JS: It’s all about choices. You are really playing in the moment, and you’re making choices about everything you do. It’s up to the limits of your imagination, and I guess skill, what you can do.

AAJ: What comes to mind are Annie Dillard’s books. For example … .

JS: Wait, is that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? It had a lot to do with somebody that was interested in nature, but until I picked up hers, I hardly ever read a book.

AAJ: Didn’t you start by playing piano?

JS: My mom had inherited a Steinway piano from her father. I played that from a window overlooking the ocean on the furthest Western point in the United States. On the Homestead, I would cut out and practice, so no one would ask me to do chores or wash dishes. You know, I played piano concerts around the country. The violin was just something I picked up on the side and played it summers mostly, also fiddled Beatles tunes with my dad.

My parents decided to move out of the Homestead house and move down to this forest to get out of the constant winds. That was real hippie stuff, back to nature and all. Anyway, I was taking piano lessons in the town of Arcata where I live now and added classical violin lessons. It was a 4-hour round trip drive. Then when I was 12 or 13, I found the jazz records my father collected when he grew up in New York City. I really was digging them, but I think it was probably more due to classical training that I found it hard to get into them on the piano. The transition was so much easier on the violin because it is a melodic instrument you can sing to, and we used to sing.

AAJ: You talk about all that like it was so effortless, like riding a bike or in your case a horse.

JS: I went to college at a younger age than most, and I put myself through by playing in these Gypsy swing bands. Then I got into writing and was kind of obsessed with the whole avant-garde scene, but it wasn’t happening in San Francisco after all the musicians began leaving for New York.

AAJ: Naturally, you followed them.

JS: Of course. I started playing at the Vanguard and met Bill Frisell.

AAJ: And the rest, as they say, is history.

JS: Pretty much. I mean, this is all I ever want to do even when I’m older.

AAJ: Well, that’s a relief. I mean, you do have a family but those who love your music would say that’s the most important thing. I’m kidding. Maybe.

JS: (chuckles) They both are important at different times.

AAJ: You’ve done so many interviews as everybody does when a new record comes out and get asked a lot of the same questions. What would be one question that nobody’s ever asked you that perhaps you wish somebody had asked?

JS: That is such a cool idea.

AAJ: Listening to All Species Parade last night around 1 a.m., something came to me, insisting I ask you that.

JS: Well, I mean, if I put myself in the shoes of an audience, what does it feel like to play music? It is really fun. And I always wonder what it’s like to live life without being able to play music. It’s energetic, it’s athletic, it’s spiritual. It’s very intimate with the other players. It’s endless trust games. But the feeling of making music is sort of a constant out of body experience because there is no time. That’s the experience of improvising with a band. It’s also a little bit similar to the experience of writing music. That is something that’s very connected to time because you’re in tempo, even a rubato tune, even a tune that doesn’t have a constant pulse has a shape in time. And so you go into this world that has a grid in a way. It has a feel and it has time, but you are living in the very edge of every moment. And there’s very few things that can do that.

The other thing that’s really kind of mind blowing about it is that, and I actually think that great music and the neurologist writer, what is his name? I’m forgetting his name right now. He articulated that it’s only in music that we can hear multiphonic voices at once in a conversation. We really can’t hear more than one person talking at once. I mean, maybe you can sort of hear, but in music, you can hear five people at once. And that kind of experience of connectivity is amazing as an audience. And to be in it is like being in the barrel of a wave. It’s really very connected. That’s the thing that popped into my head to sort of share the experience, I guess, of doing it. I’d like to be able to share that with people. I mean, that’s why you play it, but there’s really nothing like being right on the inside of it.

AAJ: So, improvisation is something you have to take yourself out of. It’s nothing that you can think through. I know that from unfortunate personal experience, being a mediocre improviser.

JS: Sometimes I’m playing and I’m actually focused on, say, the bass and the drums, but perhaps I might even be soloing and making up a whole narrative. What I’m focused on is listening to other people, that bond between performer and audience. I’m going to let this dog out. Excuse me. He just wants to lie in the sun. I wouldn’t mind joining him after we’ve finished.

strong>AAJ: Did you listen to other violinists as you were developing your style?

JS: Yeah, I did. This kind of miraculous thing happened when I was about 13 or so. Some friend of my family came out to visit, and they must have recognized some potential in me for playing jazz or non-classical music on violin. They left a box of records at our house and included were about twenty jazz violinists. It was very calculated but like a magic drop. And I never knew who did that. Actually, a couple years ago, I was getting a shot at the doctor’s back in the lab, and I for whatever reason mentioned that story. The guy that was giving me the shot said, that was my dad. It was crazy that he knew who that was.

Anyway, I was exposed to jazz violin pretty early, and though I wouldn’t say that jazz violin in itself is a primary influence, it told me that was an option but you can do other stuff. You don’t have to play Bach partitas or fiddle tunes your whole life. You can just make up stuff and write your own course in this music. I actually have a show that I tour with