The Sweet Smell of Success: Jenny Scheinman's All Species Parade

There are many ways to measure success in the jazz world. Financial remuneration, and its related gauge, popularity, is one common metric. Accolades and critical response is another. Other yardsticks of success, like being part of a collaborative community of like-minded artists, and sharing your creative life with appreciative audiences, offer more intrinsic rewards. By all those criteria, violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman is flourishing.

The 45 year old daughter of Humboldt County brought her latest project, All Species Parade, to the Community Music School of Springfield on January 9. Featuring Steve Cardenas (guitar), Julian Shore (piano), Tony Scherr (bass), Kenny Wollesen (drums) and Julianna Cressman (dance), Scheinman’s band was on a three day jaunt through Portsmouth, NH (Jimmy’s Jazz and Blues Club) and New York (City Winery), with a western Mass stop in-between, courtesy of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares.

Touring in support of her recent Royal Potato Family release, All Species Parade, the project is a paean to the Lost Coast, the remote, northern section of Californian coast where Scheinman grew up. The live performance mostly mirrored the material on the album, which is an impressive, fully realized body of work.

The evening opened with “Ornette Goes Home”, a folk-flecked swinger with solo room for everyone, then stretched out for 90 glorious minutes. Each composition had something distinct to say, blending and borrowing from multiple genres without becoming puree. “Shutdown Stomp” was a down-home hoe-down, revealing Scheinman’s honky-tonk fiddler side. “House of Flowers”, a lovely piece with the air of a British isle traditional, featured a delicate melody that highlighted Scheinman’s beautiful tone. The band was expert and brought the written material to life.

Scheinman explained in her introduction that “Jaroujiji” was a Wiyot word that means “where you sit and rest”, and references a place settlers came to call Eureka (“I have found it”). The Wiyot are a small northern California tribe that in 1860 were massacred almost to the point of extinction. Scheinman, who has done extensive research about the region and its history, was moved to hear Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page’s family story. Page’s great-great grandmother, two years old at the time, was one of 100 Wiyots who survived that mass killing on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay.

The band was anchored by bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, who are the rhythm team for Steve Bernstein’s Sexmob and various Bill Frisell ensembles. Their easy rapport put us all at ease. At the post-concert reception, Wollesen shared the story of his grandmother, Rose Thorne, who wrote a dozen songs in the 1920s and 30s that were thought lost in a fire but were recently found. Wollesen arranged and recorded the songs and shared a download code for one of them: “Moon Swing”, featuring Wollesen on vibraphone and the massive bass marimba, which he bought from Scott Robinson (who had two!) Scherr’s bass permeated the elegant Newhouse Hall with a deep luscious sound. He used a bass supplied by the Music School which was in need of some tender loving care. Scherr was gracious about the state of the instrument and resourceful in bringing it up to snuff.

The Jazz Shares streak of confounding medical issues reached three consecutive concerts when Carmen Staaf, who is on the recording, got sick and was unable to play piano. Luckily her husband, Julian Shore, was able to pinch hit at the last minute. He told me that unlike his friends Noah Preminger and Dan Weiss, who delight in throwing musical curve balls at musicians, Scheinman and her band were terrifically supportive as he embarked on a crash course to learn the material. He acquitted himself quite well. His extensive solos on “Shutdown Stomp”, and the as yet unrecorded, “For B”, showed his fluid bop chops and his rapid learning curve understanding the architecture of each composition.

Steve Cardenas is the consummate professional. He has an incisive, unadorned sound and a thorough grasp on jazz guitar history. He was a long-time member of Paul Motion’s Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and multiple ensembles led by Ben Allison. He has recorded extensively as a leader for Sunnyside Records, his most recent being Healing Power (The Music of Carla Bley) featuring Allison and Ted Nash. His work on the evening’s concluding piece, “Song for Sidiki”, written by Scheinman for the Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, highlighted Cardenas’ innovative take on the west African electric guitar tradition. 

Scheinman has led a charmed life in music. She’s been a regular in bands led by Allison Miller and Bill Frisell, and has toured with Lucinda Williams, Jason Moran, Ani DiFranco and Robbie Fulks. She performed on the original cast recording of Anais Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown”, and has written the score to the movie, “Avenue of the Giants”. Her bandmates are all good friends; it’s clear that relationships matter to her. Scheinman is engaged in the here and now and spent the day of her concert walking to the Connecticut River. She was a gracious bandleader and was clearly having fun on stage. Her playing was confident and easily cut across styles.

All Species Parade is performing at the Big Ears Festival, the Savanah Jazz Festival and the Green Mill (Chicago) in the coming months. She’s also performing in Allison Miller’s multimedia piece, Rivers in Our Veins at 92NY Center For Culture & Arts, and will be at Bombyx on Feb. 4 with Bill Frisell’s In My Dreams. Jenny Scheinman is playing bigger, more prestigious venues these days. The critical acclaim is pouring in and she’s making music of high quality with close collaborators. She’s got success written all over her.

Thinking On Your Feet: New Muse4tet in Springfield

About a third of the way through the New Muse4tet concert at the Community Music School of Springfield on January 4, violinist Gwen Laster, the leader of the ensemble, reminded us that “all of us have to improvise every day.” The quartet, reduced to three when violist Melanie Dyer took ill and couldn’t make the trip from New York, had to reconfigure repertoire and arrangements on the fly. Luckily, for seasoned jazz artists like Laster and her bandmates, Teddy Rankin-Parker (cello) and Andrew Drury (drums), improvising is second nature. It’s what they do.

This followed on the heels of another medical mishap on December 19 when cornetist Kirk Knuffke was unable to continue playing with his bandmates, Joe McPhee and Michael Bisio at the Parlor Room. Then, too, the show went on, albeit with some drama and disruption.

Although the band, (New Muse3tet?), largely stuck to their original compositional game plan, there was more improvising on stage. Precipitated by Dyer’s absence, Laster decided that each musician would play a duo with the others. The pairings provided additional intimacy on stage and broke up the soundscape in a very nice way. While the Laster/Drury duet was a funky piece with clear form, Laster’s go-round with Rankin-Parker featured heavily textured string vibrations with little rhythmic roadmap. Both were captivating.

The percussion/cello duo was spontaneously composed and something else entirely. Drury was hardly seated at his kit. He was up playing a set of metal bowls, then some hanging gongs. At one point he left the stage and returned with a timpani (one of the benefits of having the show at a music school), which he proceeded to sing into using a funnel-like devise on the skin of the drum. His kitchen-sink approach to the world of percussion added dynamism and levity. Rankin-Parker matched him surprise for surprise, rapping the body of his cello and producing other-worldly harmonics.

This was my first opportunity to hear Rankin-Parker, who had a gorgeous tone, a surfeit of technique, and a fearless spirit. It was yet another reminder that there are always more first rate creative musicians to meet. Rankin-Parker came up in Chicago, replacing Tomeka Reid in Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, and interacting with other members of the City’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He also has a foot in the rock music world, recording and touring for years with Primus and Sam Beam’s Iron & Wine. In another life, he is a LMSW Gestalt Therapist in New York, as well as the father of two kids under 5 years old. All evening, I had the sense that he was the center of the band, the fulcrum between rhythm and melody.

At another point I was convinced Drury was the band’s linchpin. Stationed in between the two string players, he added excitement and a foundational drive. He served as wild card. Drury is an affable, low key dynamo, both on and off the bandstand. He founded and runs Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit dedicated to education and performance in marginalized communities. He cooks for, and curates, Soup & Sound, a series of world-class concerts given in his Brooklyn home, which has presented over 130 events. He has given masterclasses on three continents, and has led over 1,500 workshops in schools, prisons, museums, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, with Kurdish refugees in Germany, on Indian reservations (including the Oneida Nation where he was artist-in-residence for six months in 2000) and in remote villages in Guatemala and Nicaragua. I first met him in 2015, when the UMass Magic Triangle Series presented Jason Kao Hwang’s cross-cultural octet, Burning Bridge. I’ve been an admirer since. It occurred to me, that with its array of marimbas, timpani, glockenspiel and other percussion, the Community Music School of Springfield would be the perfect venue to present Drury’s percussion ensemble, The Forest.

Gwen Laster was a gracious and resourceful leader, and a fabulous composer and instrumentalist. She referenced Claudia Rankine’s book of poems, “Citizen” and Clyde Ford’s “The Hero With an African Face”, as inspiring two of her compositions. (Cuban music scholar Ivor Miller who was in attendance, immediately ran out and got a copy of Ford’s collection of African myths.) Her playing was strong, definitive and teeming with life, and the music flowed easily between poles of form and abstraction.

There were connections (community) everywhere. Laster’s colleague at Bard College, pianist Angelica Sanchez, was in the house, as was fellow violinist Terry Jenoure, whose writing workshops have helped Laster refine her thoughts. Laster reminisced with clarinetist and Amherst College professor Darryl Harper about their experience as students at the Jazz in July program. Willie Hill, the former director of the UMass Fine Arts Center, and Melanie Dyer’s middle school music teacher in Denver (!), was there to surprise her (alas!)

A roll-with-the-punches, make-it-work attitude permeates the jazz world. That was on stark display Saturday, as New Muse4tet displayed calm flexibility in the face of a last minute change of plans. With our world hurtling towards increased uncertainty, I’m throwing my lot in with those who can improvise, and who value community.

The Youth Movement Has Arrived: The Micah Thomas Trio

In the 100+ year history of the music we’ve come to call ‘jazz’, there has been almost constant handwringing over its future. The fraught, defeatist refrain: “Is jazz dead?”, and its more optimistic corollary: “keeping jazz alive”, has accompanied every style-change and aesthetic pivot throughout its evolution. I’m here to tell you, jazz - in its broadest meaning  - is as alive as it’s ever been. Exhibit A: the Micah Thomas Trio.

Pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Dean Torrey and drummer Kayvon Gordon, who performed for 55 active listeners at Hawks & Reed on December 12, are all in their late 20s-early 30s. To judge from Thursday’s results in Greenfield, the future of the music is in good hands. These three emerging artists, along with peers like Elena Pinderhughes, Immanuel Wilkins, Nubya Garcia, Mali Obamsawin, Nick Dunston, Savanah Harris, Joel Ross, Lesley Mok, Jazzmeia Horn, and many others, make it clear the jazz pipeline is flowing fine. The problem is not a lack of talent, but a dearth of opportunities to get the music before the public, especially in live performance.

Thomas has been getting his music before the public. Days before his first visit to western Mass, the 27-year old pianist was headlining Kuumbwa Jazz (Santa Cruz) and the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society (Half Moon Bay), two venerable California jazz institutions. His extensive work with his former Juilliard classmate, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, has certainly raised his profile. Adam Shatz’ glowing article in the New York Review in 2020, plus extensive coverage in the New York Times, a 2024 feature in the New York City Jazz Record, and his inclusion in Downbeat’s recent piece, “25 For the Future”, have helped create a well-deserved buzz around Thomas. Here’s Nate Chinen’s 2020 profile of him for NPR. Thomas has toured with the fire breathing  saxophonist Zoh Amba (he told me his fingers would bleed after playing with her); my friend Cliff Peterson said he recently saw him at The Falcon (Marlboro, NY) with drummer Joe Farnsworth’s band. He has the chops and the range to be comfortable anywhere in the music’s ever expanding tent.

The Trio began with a free, open-ended, three-way conversation. The musicians were listening deeply and each had something to say. I heard the intense, telepathic interplay and elastic sense of time that defines all great improvising ensembles. About half way through their 80-minute set, Thomas introduced a stride figure that catapulted the band in a dramatic new direction. Locked in and swinging, the band launched in a language we all understood. Soon enough, of course, the trio loosened the reins; liberties were again taken.

That was prelude to an even more unexpected, if timely, romp through a medley of popular Christmas melodies, including “Jingle Bells”. It was obvious from the get-go that Torrey, Gordon and Thomas could play their instruments. But playing at impossible tempos, the torrent of fresh ideas on this all-too-familiar material was impressive, to say the least. This seasonal offering pleased the crowd.

It’s always exciting to hear musicians for the first time, and my introduction to bassist Dean Torrey was a thrill. He was hyper-responsive to his surroundings, accenting his bandmate’s phrases while continuing to suggest his own. He never had to play loudly to be heard in the mix, and his supple time stretching resulted in uncertainty, drama and an element of danger. He was a perfect foil for Thomas.

Kayvon Gordon came up in jazz-rich Detroit under the tutelage of Motor City icon, Marcus Belgrave. Now living in New Jersey, Gordon works with pianist Sullivan Fortner and talented newcomers like saxophonists Kevin Sun and Nicole Glover. He can be found on recent recordings by Sun, Glover and Micah Thomas. Like his rhythm-mates, he never overplayed and was continually intent on creating a group sound.

Home base for the Micah Thomas Trio has been Smalls in New York’s Greenwich Village, where they’ve spent lots of time performing and hanging out. The night after their Jazz Shares date, the Trio worked at Mezzrow, Smalls’ sister club next door on West 10th  Street. The camaraderie and sense of shared purpose they’ve built is clear on Reveal, their 2023 Artwork Records release, and their easy rapport was apparent during dinner and their hang at my house.

Thomas told me I reminded him of Frank Kimbrough, one of his mentors at Julliard. Knowing how universally loved and respected the late pianist was, I took that as a major compliment. In fact, Thomas and his band mates seemed eager to absorb the jazz past, and humble about their own achievements thus far. But they also exuded a quiet confidence that they too are contributing to the ongoing evolution of the music. I took comfort from that.