Jenny Scheinman Relishes Musical Self-Sufficiency

Thursday March 17, 2011

From The Vancouver Free Press

Jenny Scheinman Relishes Musical Self-Sufficiency
By: Alexander Varty

Growing up in the westernmost house in the lower 48 sounds romantic, but it might not be quite as appealing when there’s a giant wall of water roaring in from Japan. Granted, on the day of the Sendai earthquake, Jenny Scheinman was safe in Brooklyn, where she now lives—but her mom was in Mendocino County, California, watching for waves.

“She’s at home alone, looking out the window at the ocean and writing revolutionary poetry, or something like that,” the violinist and singer explains. “She’s like, ‘I’ve never written through such a tumultuous time, and the tsunami and the earthquake just fit into it.’”

In the end, the waves that struck land just below the Scheinman family home were less than two metres high—or “not enough for an overhead curl”, as the surf-savvy musician points out. And her own plans were only slightly impacted by the Japanese disaster: her mom had planned to head east to baby-sit Scheinman’s young son during rehearsals for this spring’s Bruce Cockburn tour, but Mendocino’s coastal roads were closed due to the tsunami alert.

She’ll figure something out, though. Judging by both her records and her résumé, Scheinman’s one of the most adaptable—and skilled—musicians working today.

As the child of hippie intellectuals, she soon learned the virtues of independent thought. That’s served her well in the Bay Area and Brooklyn avant-garde scenes, where she’s recorded and performed with innovators such as John Zorn, Bill Frisell, and Nels Cline while crafting five records of her own instrumental compositions. Unsurprisingly, folk music was also a part of her early environment, which presumably makes it easier to record with roots icons like Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones, and Rodney Crowell. And when she starte

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"The Littlest Prisoner" w/Bruce Cockburn	4:09	Jenny Scheinman
Old Brooklyn (Crossing the Field)	3:42	Jenny Scheinman
Anna Eco (Crossing the Field)	4:01	Jenny Scheinman
Newspaper Angels	3:16	Jenny Scheinman
I Was Young When I Left Home	5:31	Jenny Scheinman

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Jenny Scheinman's Mischief & Mayhem
*"Song for Sidiki" at the Barbican

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