Drop the needle on Jenny Scheinman ’s latest album, All Species Parade, and a verdant landscape of greens, browns and ocean blues unfolds. This is music that feels alive, vibrating with the hum of a vast, interconnected ecosystem. It’s so evocative of California’s Lost Coast that when she plays this music at The Treelawn Sunday, you might just smell the petrichor and taste the salt air of the Pacific.
Scheinman’s love letter to California’s Humboldt County is supremely pictorial music, Yet the violinist, singer and composer didn’t intend to write program music.
“There’s a long tradition in art of making art makes nature a landscape like a pretty picture,” she said by phone from her home near Arcata, “I really didn’t want to do that. I really wanted it to be immersive and illuminate the power that nature has and that we are part of it, and basically submit to it.”
Submission was easy for Scheinman who grew up in Humboldt County in the westernmost house in the continental United States. After decades in New York leading her own bands and adding violin, vocals and compositions to projects by such artists as Lou Reed, Ani DiFranco and Metallica, Scheinman returned home 12 years ago.
“I’ve been a touring musician my whole life. I hadn’t been home–wherever my home was–for more than six weeks since I was 16, she said. The pandemic changed all that, but while touring stopped for Scheinman, music continued, and even flourished.
“I was playing a lot outside during that time because to play with anybody you had to go outside” she said. “We wanted to play music that sounded good outside because we were playing it outside, but we soon realized that almost all of the music we were writing was starting to reflect and rejoice in the beauty of the place we were in.”
That place is conjured with almost tactile verisimilitude on All Species Parade, from the tippy-toe dance of “Every Bear That Ever Was” to the majesty–and mystery–of “Jaroujiji,” the name of the Indigenous people of the region to surf’s-up, get-down stomp of “The Cape” to the giddily tumbling “Ornette Goes Home,” sure to be your next earworm.
That’s quite a range of musical references to throw at a recording band, but in pianist Carmen Staaf, Tony Scherr on bass, drummer Kenny Wollesen and three guitarists, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, all stylistic bases were covered (Staaf, Scherr and Kenny Wollesen will be joined by guitarist Steve Cardenas at The Treelawn).
With the exception of Scherr, a Connecticut native, those musicians all grew up or lived for decades on the West Coast, a happy accident that Scheinman hadn’t thought previously about.
Before recording All Species Parade, Scheinman said, “The people that I workshopped the music with I ended up taking on a little tour on the West Coast, but I couldn’t take them on tour for a month at a time. They had jobs.” And that meant they also couldn’t spend weeks in the studio either.
Yet the family spirit shines through the music like a sunrise over the Pacific, as well it might given the deep connections Scheinman has forged with these musicians.
“The band that’s on this album is my closest circle of musicians that I’ve been making records with for most of my 10 records in various formations,” she said. “So I really thought I was just doing it with my homies, you know, with my besties and the people that I know well.
“A lot of the album is sort of about home and it’s not necessarily just about my home. It’s about anyone’s home and sort of what grows there and how that influences us throughout our lives, formative influences.”
Jenny Scheinman’s All Species Parade with Steve Cardenas, Tony Scherr, Carmen Staaf and Kenny Wollesen, Sunday, April 6, 7 p.m., Treelawn Social Club, 15335 Waterloo Rd,, Cleveland, Tickets $25, available here, and Tuesday, April 8, 7 p.m. at City Gallery, 1503 State St., Erie, Penn., suggested donation $20 at door.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
