Jenny Scheinman

APPEARING: MANHATTAN MARATHON @ City Winery

Friday, January 10, 2025

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-lead 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 in the Pacific Northwest. Her epic new release, All Species Parade, is the result of these meditations.