Jenny Scheinman
I had the opportunity to talk to violinist Jenny Scheinman. She’s known as an instrumentalist with an experimental side, but she’s going to show a different part of herself with a vocal CD coming out on May 27 (and an instrumental album on the same date, as a vinyl release and download at first, then a CD release in the fall). She’s touring around promoting the vocal work currently.
JM: I know the vocal thing is a departure for you, but I also know that you’ve done local performances leading up to it. How did that all start?
JS: I’m attracted to obscure gigs in obscure parts of obscure boroughs, especially because I can try things and keep it real, so to speak. The way I grew up playing was outside the commercial realm and playing around the campfire, playing at fiddle festivals, playing with my family, and I started singing occasionally on those gigs. I’ve always sung a couple songs here and there mixed into the folkier side of my instrumental music. There were a few people who were very encouraging about my singing and I guess I started noticing that I was moving people, and so I thought I’d do it a little more. Norah Jones, who’s been a friend for many years since I’ve lived in New York, heard me sing and was very insistent that I do something. After delaying, not really because of shyness but because of busyness, she said ‘Hey, let’s do a band called A Date With Jenny and I’ll play with you.’ So I booked a summer of gigs with her and started it off.
Greg Cohen was also another person, though I haven’t played with him a whole lot recently and he’s not on my singing record, I did a gig with him, right at the beginning at this singing band and there was something that really clicked. He said a few things that made me realize that I wasn’t as far from it as I thought, that I can sing and I grew up singing and playing the violin is not such a far cry from singing, of all instruments. Just playing a melodic instrument like that has really focused my ear and my musicianship on what it is to deliver a melody. He’s a wise man. He said some things that made me think, well, what the fuck, I’ll try it. I did some more gigs with him and it just really moving.
I studied literature and I read a bit, it’s been really moving to just focus on words again, especially as they are embodied in melodies, it’s such a miraculous and moving thing to be able to hear a lyric sung or sing one, of course, it’s such a deep kind of communication, it’s so emotional, it’s just very compelling. I started doing it and getting what you always try for as a musician, which is that feedback from the audience, where you feel that you are communicating with people and moving people and they’re moving you and there’s this cyclical thing that starts happening and makes you want to do it more because it feels like you’re being useful. You’re doing something beyond yourself. The singing had that from the very beginning.
JM: What sort of songs were you working with in the beginning? Were you covering songs and doing your own?
JS: I was only doing covers and the book of songs that I have been working from is really songs that I grew up with. I started with songs, what is that Bob Dylan line? ‘Know your song well before you sing it.’ It was that. I sang songs that I’ve know since I was a kid and then it branched out into other cover songs and then it was really my own study in what makes a great song. Songs that I wanted to sing over and over and over stayed and then I’ve been writing, there are four original songs on that album. I have more now. My next record will most likely be more original songs. That was the base, though — songs I know really well that I think are great.
JM: How comfortable are you writing words — and how did that compare with music?
JS: It’s harder, it’s more. You’re not only writing the melody and figuring out the form and thinking about the instrumentation, but you’re thinking about pinning it down, pinning down what this means. With instrumental music, you don’t really have to commit to a meaning. Also, I delight in my own musical obsessions, I can spend hours and hours on the turn of a phrase in a lyric. It takes me a while. Some things come out real quickly, though. I don’t know, though, I’ve spent a lot of time writing instrumental music as well. I feel like there’s a level of commitment with a lyric that makes me want to get it pretty much done before I sing it to people, I want to know what I’m telling them before I sing it. With instrumental music, I’ll have little scraps and I’ll just try stuff and certain things will float to the top and I’ll end up living with those longer or recording them.
JM: It seems that having lyrics leaves less work for the audience because you’re giving more of yourself, what’s going on inside of you, whereas music is open to other connotations.
JS: Yeah. You’re committing to a story. Some lyrics really aren’t very clear and they’re great, they leave the audience puzzling over their meaning, but as the writer, I’m not going for obscuring meaning, even in instrumental music I’m trying to express something very clear. With the originals on my album, I know what those songs mean and I think they’re pretty clear when you hear them, they’re not difficult or particularly abstract.
JM: With your lyrics and with the songs you were choosing, were you able to cover any territory or concerns that you hadn’t previously been able to touch before?
JS: Well, here’s an example. There’s an original song on there called ‘The Dream’ and it’s basically about my aunt, who disappeared a couple of years ago and left us wondering where she went and coming up with horrible conclusions — disappeared, runaway, who knows? So I wrote a song for her and the lyric is from the perspective of her family, from me, wondering what happened, and guessing the worst – and living with that horror. But I had written another song for her on my other record, a song called ‘Sleeping in the Aquifer,’ on my last record ‘12 Songs,’ and there’s another one on this upcoming one called ‘Ripples in the Aquifer’ and on ‘12 Songs,’ it says ‘For Joan Taylor,’ it says it’s for my aunt, but you would never know listening to it. I was able in that situation to go leading more directly into something and say something which is a kind of relief. In terms of content in the instrumental song for my aunt, I could’ve named it something else, it wouldn’t change the piece too much, whereas the song with words, there’s no way of changing that, it’s definitely a story.
Musically, as a singer, I can sing in different situations than I can as a player. There are songs on there where I don’t even play. I love rock and roll and I’m not a huge fan of rock violin, so I’m able to explore the rock side in a different way with the singing band, which is really fun. I don’t know what else I’m able to explore — you can just see with the differences in the records what singing has lead me into and what instrumental music has lead me into. I don’t have a lot of desire to cover instrumental folk music, whereas I feel more compelled to do that as a singer because there’s a lyric there and, in some ways, more to interpret.
JM: When you got started singing, did you make conscience choices meant to differentiate this work from your instrumental music, or was it a more natural progression for you?
JS: I guess the latter. I actually would like it if they could fit more together, it would be more convenient for me for touring. I am definitely not trying to be any more scattered than I already am. I’m already doing a lot of things. It just all happened naturally and had to do with what I heard. These are the songs that I want to sing. It’s a reflection, also, of my childhood, a bit — these are the songs that I wanted to sing are rooted in much older stuff than the instrumental music. Not that the instrumental music isn’t rooted in old stuff — I started listening to jazz and playing jazz when I was a mid-teenager — but I also grew up in songs.
I’ve also, a little more recently, worked as an arranger for some great singers and so I’ve really been focused more on songs. I’ve worked with Lucinda Williams a bunch and just did a thing with Lou Reed, which was great, just a bunch of different things like that. And I’ve toured a lot, singers tend to hire me to play with them, so I’ve focused on that a bit. It’s interesting, the albums sound different, and yet if you look at the personal, it’s all the same people. And it’s not that they arrived for the singing session trying to play country, it’s just that the songs make you do that and we’re playing the songs. I wasn’t trying to do anything different at all, I was just trying to do what I heard.
JM: What did you just do with Lou Reed?
JS: It was awesome. It’s a new song of his that will probably be on his next record. He sent me an MP3 of the rough of it and I arranged a string quartet for it and played the string quartet for it and then ended up doing another arrangement for him at the session. A couple songs for his new record. I focused on him for a while, and that song. I hadn’t really ever directly thought about him and hadn’t thought about working with him, but he’s an amazing lyricist, really, really tremendous lyricist, so raw and moving and surprising and mysterious. Just the master.
JM: You said you wished the music between the two albums was more alike, but are there any similarities that you see that other people might not notice?
JS: I’m really curious what critics are going to say about that question, people who are in the field of listening to lots of stuff and describing it and trying to understand what’s happening culturally, how this stuff comes about. I don’t know, it’s all me, I’m connected to all of it, I’m not really trying to do anything on either of the records other than pursue a sound. But, I don’t know, if you listen to my violin solos on the instrumental record, they’re me, it’s what I sound like. When you hear the violin solos on my singing record, you can hear that’s the same person.
The vocal record is very much focused around Tony Scher, he’s a dominant character in that, and he wasn’t on the instrumental record. He has a very emotional, raw, rough, very deep kind of approach to things and my approach in making records has always been musician centered, it’s about casting. I wanted to do that vocal record with Tony because of the way Tony hears music and the way it moves him, and I wanted to do the instrumental record, this time featuring Jason Moran and Bill Frisell and the sound of the rest of the band. In that way, they’re similar, because they’re about me and my relationships with the musicians on the record and it’s bound to be different. If it was exactly the same musicians on both records they might be similar, but I think Tony definitely differentiates the vocal record, because there’s a kind of brutality, and he’s a totally original voice on guitar and he really pushed it in a direction, which I welcomed.
JM: I guess the real test would be, if you did a show featuring bits of both CDs, who would come? Do you think you’d have two different audiences?
JS: I play in Brooklyn every week when I’m in town and there are a lot of people who come to both, whether I’m singing or whether I’m playing. Occasionally, if it’s the right band, I’ll do a little bit of each, especially in a casual setting at my regular place, Barbes. But then I do get an occasional comment, somebody will come up and say ‘When are you going to sing next?
This stuff is too abstract and complicated for me,’ and then I’ll get the reverse from the jazz fanatics saying, ‘What are you doing, sell out and singing country songs?’ They’ll just have to figure that out themselves.
JM: That’s a funny thing to say, “selling out.”
JS: Nobody’s ever actually said that, that’s just sort of my self-deprecating way. But for people who are hooked on the satisfaction of abstract, instrumental music often are reluctant to go for a singing thing, it’s more direct, they don’t want to be assaulted with something really clear like that. I’m fascinated by it. There are people who just listen to instrumental music and they’re just going to want to follow that. They want to be in that experience that it gives you.
JM: Any person who creates, they become known for one thing, but everyone’s multi-faceted, everyone likes different things, but sometimes it can seem as though fans aren’t clued into that side of the creator.
JS: Fans get attached to things that they like. There are so many legendary examples of that, even if it’s Dylan changing and plugging in — he’s still singing the same songs, they’re just electric, and people freak out. Whether it’s Miles going electric, anytime anybody experiments, the people who are attached to what they have done fell unsettled, it’s like your husband or wife having a sex change or something! No, it’s not that extreme, but having some new characteristic come out, it’s unsettling for people, I guess, and with music, it feels intimate to listen to a record and listen to music, it feels like you have some relationship with the artist, and yet you don’t at all, really. You don’t really have any idea of how they’re making stuff and what they’re thinking about and what records they’re listening to, there’s no ownership of the artist, and yet people feel that way.
And also, I can speak for myself, I don’t really know why I end up in things, but I just have to trust my passion if I end up doing a singing record. There’s like 10 records I want to do and the ones I end up doing are the ones that I really, really, really want to do. I don’t have time to do everything that I think up. There’s a reason I did a singing record and it’s not just to make the record — it’s leading me into something, maybe it’s answering some questions I had about what a song is. Maybe I won’t sing again. I think I will keep singing, but I don’t really know exactly why I did that and what it’s leading to, but it might lead back to the very thing that all the jazz people want me to do. Maybe after this I’ll understand songs more and write a really great instrumental record that somehow gets that magic of song in there, which was really part of the assignment for my last record, ‘12 Songs.’ It was named ‘12 Songs’ because I was really exploring the boundaries between lyric and melody and song and song from and trying to get that power of song.
Social Links