Jenny Scheinman

Jenny Scheinman has made her mark as a violinist, composer, improviser, bandleader, and vocalist, emerging as a key figure in avant jazz and roots-infused creative music across both American coasts, with notable influence in Brooklyn’s experimental jazz community after relocating from the West Coast in 1999. She treated her long-running weekly engagement at the Park Slope venue Barbès throughout much of the 2000s as an incubator for material ranging from avant jazz to country-folk singer-songwriter forms, yielding well-received recordings such as 12 Songs in 2005 and the self-titled 2008 album. A steady participant in Bill Frisell’s studio and road groups, she has also worked alongside Norah Jones, Sean Lennon, Paul Motian, Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, and Madeleine Peyroux, among numerous additional artists. Following her return to California in the early 2010s, she delivered the 2012 quartet outing Mischief & Mayhem. She joined drummer Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom ensemble and later shared leadership of the 2019 release Parlour Game with Miller, before leading the double-length All Species Parade with an all-star septet.

Raised amid the rustic, artistically inclined, and politically progressive setting of Petrolia on California’s coast—despite her parents’ New York origins—Scheinman earned a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and launched her professional violin career in the Bay Area. Her earliest recording, Live at Yoshi’s, issued on the Avant label, a Japanese DIW subsidiary overseen by John Zorn, captured a September 1999 performance at the historic Oakland club with bassist Todd Sickafoose, drummer Scott Amendola, and guitarist Dave MacNab. Arriving in Brooklyn the same year, she quickly produced albums for Tzadik (The Rabbi’s Lover, Shalagaster) and Cryptogramophone (12 Songs), drawing on a supporting cast that featured Frisell, Myra Melford, Ron Miles, Greg Cohen, Kenny Wollesen, and Trevor Dunn. In 2007 she toured with a quartet that included guitarist Nels Cline, whose visibility had grown substantially through his association with Wilco, along with Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black.

She simultaneously leveraged her Barbès residency to develop her persona as a folk-country-blues vocalist aimed at audiences beyond the compact avant jazz circuit. The 2008 self-titled album on Koch placed her singing at the forefront across covers by Lucinda Williams, Jimmy Reed, Mississippi John Hurt, and Tom Waits plus four originals, while the companion instrumental set Crossing the Field appeared on Koch that same year. Four years afterward, the independent Mischief & Mayhem, again featuring Cline, Sickafoose, and Black, came out on her own imprint.

Scheinman moved back to California in 2012 to start a family with her partner, settling in a residence previously owned by her mother. She appeared as a guest on Robbie Fulks’ Gone Away Backward the next year, then signed with Sony Masterworks later in 2013. Her first release for the label, The Littlest Prisoner, showcased her trio with Brian Blade and Frisell alongside additional guests; Tucker Martine produced, engineered, and mixed the May 2014 record. Royal Potato Family issued her ninth album, Here on Earth, in 2017—an intimate collection of fiddle tunes drawn from 1936–1942 Piedmont archival films—featuring Frisell on guitar, Fulks on guitar and banjo, Danny Barnes on banjo, guitar, and tuba, and Robbie Gjersoe on resonator guitar. While contributing to Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom and its 2019 album Glitter Wolf, Scheinman and Miller also co-led their own project; Parlour Game, recorded with pianist Carmen Staaf and bassist Tony Scherr, emerged that August.

After the pandemic and renewed touring with others and her own groups, Scheinman reentered the studio to realize a long-germinating tribute to Humboldt County, California, where she grew up. She composed a song cycle centered on the area’s distinctive local figures and outlined a multimedia work referencing its namesake, Alexander Von Humboldt. She partnered with filmmaker Ai Aiwane on the video installation Cojo Come Home about the Mattole River while absorbing the region’s sonic and cultural heritage, seeking to evoke through sound the remarkable variety of life across past and present in the Pacific Northwest. She assembled a septet comprising Staaf, Scherr, drummer Kenny Wollesen, and guitarists Frisell, Cline, and Julian Lage; the resulting double-length All Species Parade appeared on Royal Potato Family in October 2024 as she toured the United States.