Sitting at a Steinway piano passed down from her grandmother, observing the ever-changing skyscape stretching to the horizon over the frothing Pacific Ocean, violinist Jenny Scheinman had plenty of time to contemplate her particular place in the biosphere during the first years of the pandemic.
She’d returned to the sweeping view in the house her back-to-the-land parents built on a remote tract on Humboldt County’s Lost Coast, an ideal location to pursue a project inspired by the flora and fauna that Scheinman encountered as a child during morning horseback rides to a one-room schoolhouse.
Captured on her new Royal Potato Family double album “All Species Parade,” the resulting music, exuberantly varied and intensely evocative, was shaped by “the wooden house creaking in the wind and the whole feeling of being on the edge of the continent,” said Scheinman, a former Santa Cruz resident who performs Oct. 9. at Kuumbwa.
The East-meets-West All Species Parade quintet featuring pianist Carmen Staaf and Sex Mob bassist Tony Scherr, who both live in New York City, and Los Angeles residents Adam Ratner on guitar and Moraga native Mark Ferber on drums, also plays a three-night, eight-show run at Mr. Tipple’s, Oct. 10-12.
In the past Scheinman has tended to write melodically driven tunes, whether for instrumental ensembles or for lyrics delivered by her winsome vocals. “All Species Parade” is a different sort of beast. Looking to create opportunities for her band to stretch out, she composed a diverse program of 10 pieces designed for a 72-minute CD or double LP, “with each of the four sides under 20 minutes, so the sound quality is amazing,” she said.
The album opens with the coruscating hoedown “Ornette Goes Home,” an homage to the late jazz explorer Ornette Coleman, an ingenious, blues-steeped melodicist from Texas who combined child-like wonder with a penchant for recondite theory.
Scheinman imagines him on a journey similar to the one that brought her back to the Lost Coast, “a daydream of Ornette going back to Fort Worth during a shutdown. He was supremely urban and yet we contain our bioregions, the sounds and landscapes of our childhood, and I was thinking of his music as additive, as a singular event,” with the past and present converging.
The album’s centerpiece is a three-movement, 20-minute suite written after Scheinman immersed herself in the extended works of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The calm and measured “Jaroujiji,” which is dedicated to Humboldt’s Wiyot Tribe,” bookends the album’s lithe and coiled title track, a piece that thrums with an insistent will to live. In between, there’s a brief interlude, redolent of South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s spiritual piano work, by Staaf, Scheinman’s bandmate in Parlour Game, the quartet the violinist co-leads with drum star Allison Miller.
“Jenny has so many different musical reference points, so there’s a lot of variety in this music,” said Staaf, who’s spent much of the past decade as accompanist and music director for NEA Jazz Master Dee Dee Bridgewater. “No matter what the style though, there’s a through-line, a really distinct mood, story, or image, often based in nature or animals. There’s a lot of sense of place in her music, and I love feeling like we’re going on a journey together.”
If there’s a through-line to Scheinman’s musical adventures, it’s that she carries her folk-to-chamber-music palette into every musical situation, whether she’s collaborating with jazz luminaries such as Bill Frisell, Christian McBride, Jason Moran, and Brian Blade or working with singer/songwriters like Lucinda Williams, Bruce Cockburn, Robbie Fulks, Rodney Crowell, Joni Mitchell, and Anaïs Mitchell (including a featured role on the original cast recording of Mitchell’s hit musical “Hadestown”).
Given her far-flung musical travels, it seems fitting that Scheinman’s San Francisco engagement corresponds with the start of a “jazz passport” initiative funded by a City of San Francisco grant intended to help revive downtown nightlife. Spearheaded by Mr. Tipple’s proprietor Jay Bordeleau along with Black Cat, Dawn Club, and Keys Jazz Bistro, the program offers the opportunity to catch free shows (with a round of drinks) after attending gigs at all four participating venues between now and year’s end.
Rather than shedding her formative environment as an itinerant artist, Scheinman cultivated the mossy realm of her youth, channeling the “All Species Parade” music while contemplating that Lost Coast view.
“The melodies just kind of came to me,” she said. “They’re written in that and from that, if not maybe about that. I’ve got a somewhat mystical beliefe that there are places on the planet where tunes collect, and that’s definitely one of them.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
JENNY SCHEINMAN
When & where: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $21-$42, www.kuumbwajazz.org; Oct. 10-12 at Mr. Tipple’s, San Francisco, $12-$30; mrtipplessf.com
