Jenny Scheinman All Species Parade 180g 2LP

TAS Rated 5/5 Music, 4.5/5 Sonics in the January 2025 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

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-led 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, past and present, 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 Lage, and the revered rhythm team of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen. It was recorded by Eli Crews at The Bunker in Brooklyn, NY and mixed by Grammy Award-nominated engineer Tucker Martine and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

Scheinman's playing is radiant, soulful, stamped with jazz vernacular and old-time fiddling tradition and buoyed by her superb lyrical poise and technique. Throughout we hear Frisell's exploratory wisdom and evidence of his deep connection with Scheinman (whose side-person credits include nine Frisell albums).

While All Species Parade does evoke a sense of pastoral calm and wonder, it also strives to capture "a charged relationship to the natural world," Scheinman says, "a feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves. Something powerful, fragile and constantly changing. Something alive. I want to recreate that experience of awe."

The swirling instrumental cohesiveness and lush coloration combine with Scheinman's confident, genre-defying compositional approach to make All Species Parade her magnum opus. Her whimsical and raucous tunes, with deliberate or tangential allusions to Ornette Coleman, Henry Mancini, Django Reinhardt, and Dick Dale, fit perfectly, in suite-like LP sides, alongside her extended, romantic and reflective elegies. Scheinman's violin, in conversation with piano and guitars (especially Frisell's), soars to breathtaking heights of joy and descends to heartbreaking depths of melancholy, suggesting the beauty and fragility of life in all its forms.

...one of Scheinman's most developed and orchestrated collections and yet none of the players feel hemmed in. Everyone, herself included, gets a chance to stretch out and explore, all in service of the compositions.