Jenny Scheinman Trio
Jenny Scheinman is a singer, violin player, composer, and arranger. She has been on
numerous Grammy-winning recordings and has been one of the top violinists in the
DownBeat Critics Poll for more than a decade. She grew up on a homestead in
Northern California in a family of folk musicians, studied at Oberlin Conservatory,
graduated with a degree in English literature from UC Berkeley, and has been performing
since she was a teenager. She spent her early 20s in the San Francisco Bay Area, moved to
Brooklyn in 1998, and is considered a leader in the Brooklyn arts renaissance.
Scheinman has spent much of the last four years on the road with Bruce Cockburn, Jimmie
Dale Gilmore, and Rodney Crowell as their opening act and fiddle player. She has also
worked closely with Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones, Lou Reed, and Madeleine Peyroux. Her
history with Bill Frisell goes back to 1998, when they met on a recording date produced by
his longtime manager Lee Townsend. Since then, they have made 12 studio albums and more
than a dozen live recordings together.
In 2009, Scheinman released her fifth and most extravagant instrumental album to date,
Crossing the Field, which features colleagues Frisell, Jason Moran, Doug
Wieselman, Ron Miles, Kenny Wollesen, and Tim Luntzel, plus a string orchestra led by
Brooklyn Rider. Since then, she has been exploring smaller instrumentations. In 2012, she
released Mischief & Mayhem with Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Jim Black,
and Todd Sickafoose. She has just recorded a trio album with Frisell and Brian
Blade, as well as a suite of solo fiddle/violin music.
Scheinman moved back to Northern California in 2012, where she now resides with her two
young children and her partner, artist Andrew Nofsinger. She believes that the arts are
integral to the conscience and evolution of our culture, and is working to bring music into
the lives of rural kids in her hometown.
Frisell's career as a guitarist and composer has spanned more than 35 years and over 250
recordings, including 40 albums of his own. He has collaborated with a wide range of
artists, filmmakers, and legendary musicians, but it is his work as a leader that has
garnered increasing attention and accolades. In 2006, Frisell was named a USA Rasmuson
Fellow grant recipient, offered by United States Artists. He is also a recipient of grants
from Meet the Composer and National Performance Network, and in 2012 was awarded a Doris
Duke Fellowship.
The multi-talented Blade is widely respected in the jazz world as a drummer, composer, and
leader of The Fellowship Band, with whom he has released three albums. He is also known for
his work with Daniel Lanois, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Wayne Shorter, Bill Frisell, and
Emmylou Harris. Blade is always searching for the balance that gives a song a personal
story with an outward-reaching resonance. In 2009, he released his first recording as a
singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Mama Rosa.
Scheinman's trio with Frisell and Blade was born in New York City's venerable Village
Vanguard in December 2011. She had always wanted to perform with Brian Blade, and a
weeklong-run in the intimate space of the Vanguard presented the perfect opportunity. "By
the end of that week, I felt like we really knew each other, and the trio had developed a
way of playing that was it's own-spontaneous, impulsive, emotional, but really clear,"
Scheinman says. The shows were instrumental, but they included several covers that
Scheinman included on her debut vocal album, a Lucinda Williams tune, and "Love" by John
Lennon. "One of the exciting things about this trio is the breadth of repertoire," she
continues. "We can shift from a bebop instrumental to a country love song and no one gets
hurt." A year later, Scheinman brought the trio together at Tucker Martine's studio in
Portland. "I had a set of songs with words that I was dying to record, and I wanted to do
something new with the trio," she says. The result was 10 songs-seven with words and three
without.