eternal scheinman of the spotless fiddle

By Robbie on May 22, 2009

My duo series at Barbes with Jenny Scheinman soon comes to an end (details below and on tour sidebar).  For me this collaboration has been uniquely intense and rewarding. Unique because since leaving college, starting a family, and taking on music as a job, I just don't do what we've been doing, which is to get together every two or three days, while the kids are at school, and play music through the afternoon, for enjoyment.  What a concept.  

At one of our first at-home sessions, Jenny asked me to sing some strange notes above her.  Not only did the part she had in mind seem to me to violate the mood of the song and universal rules of harmony, I pulled it off terribly.  We stopped the song and stared at each other for a second, then had one of those exchanges that happen at the crossroads of wisdom and drivel.

Me: "Was that right?"

She: "Hm.  Was it?"

Me: "I don't think that was right."

She: "I don't know what's 'right'."

Me: "Me neither, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't."

This gets at what makes Jenny so singular and formidable as a musician.  Her approach to music-making is radically open-minded and inquisitive.  Her open-mindedness has led her to into all sorts of styles (bebop, singer-songwriter, old-timey, classical, blues, punk, choro, you name it; I wasn't completely joking when I told a friend, "I'm playing with this fiddler who does every kind of music except rock and country!") while her skeptical intelligence has shielded her from the dogmatic stagnation that can occur when you swim too long in any one pool. Those "rules" I just referred to?  They don't exactly exist.  Assuming that they do has helped me gain fluency in couple musical vocabularies and eased communication with fellow country-musician specialists (and, presumably, audiences).  But when these local statutes (banjo fills here, tenor voice sings a third higher on the back half of the chorus here, etc.) ossify in a player's mind into global law, he closes a door on a very wide world of musical experience.  This is the door that Jenny has permanently propped ajar.

I think "The Rabbi's Lover" was her third record.  With that one I was on board; and each successive record she released showed a sharpening in writing skills and overall artistic focus.  Her composing, I felt, favored hummable simplicity; her arrangements tended to have a sinuous and subtle development; and there was a laid-back, self-assured kind of daringness in her playing.  Daring not only in the routine sense that she was at home with roughness and noise -- pushing the intonation envelope or hitting a "wrong" note or making a squeak here and there -- but that her tone was plain-spoken and her improvisation was ardently unpyrotechnical.  That said, the depth of her craft was unmissable -- and the total effect of all this was melancholy and sternly beautiful.  This is the kind of player you want to meet and, if possible, make music with.  In fact I really don't think there are twenty other people alive with whom I would be equally eager to strum.  (I'll make that list some other time.)  But, since Jenny's musical and social spheres were pretty distant from mine, I didn't spend much time thinking of the possibility.  Then I moved to Brooklyn and suddenly she was coming over all the time.

I have to admit that I was intimidated for the first week or two, not by any behavior of Jenny's, because she turned out to be as laid-back and attentive to others as her playing hinted at, but because I couldn't shake a debilitating consciousness, sitting at the table across from her, of all she was able to do and hear.  That's silliness, pointless and self-defeating, and I appreciated my wife getting irked at me when I confessed to it.  "It's never occurred to me that there's any musician in the world you should feel intimidated by," she said, "and, in any event, I don't think that can be helping your playing."  Very true.  But there was a specific problem that persisted between Jenny and me, an inequality largely arising, I think, from our evolved habits of mind; I had been leading bands playing my own songs and arrangements for twenty years, during which she had backed up and collaborated with scads of disparate people.  So she was accustomed much more than I to bending and learning quickly and assimilating.

But I soon realized that, if only because she hadn't played that much with country flatpickers, I could contribute something real to the partnership.  For all its resources and divergently talented humanity, New York (like Chicago) is surprisingly weak on good country players.  There are a good number of folksy or tradition-oriented listeners and players, but the latter tend to be dogged by authenticity hangups, sluggish hands, weird abstract notions, and so on.  "New York has a strong Fake Roots scene," Jeff Finlin once said.   So, if you move here, as Jenny did from California ten years ago, and would like to work on some hillbilly chops, you might find yourself hard up.  She had a big book of fiddle tunes in staff notation, but playing them by sight is not as good as bouncing them off somebody else by ear (even if the versions I knew were different from the versions in the book).  She was interested in hearing some great country fiddlers, and so I threw some Benny Martin and Bobby Hicks and Michael Cleveland discs at her. (Now I'm getting a pang at some I left out, Glen Duncan and Gordon Terry and Aubrey Haynie and Curley Ray Cline and Jenee Fleenor...but it just never seems to end.)

It's interesting to see what someone so highly skilled but a little outside the fold brings to the music.  It seems to me that in large swaths of the jazz world there is a suspicion of prodigious overkill, an inverse appreciation of the childlike, an embrace of accidents that sneak out as byproducts of fired-up emotion, that just don't exist in the bluegrass world.  No doubt there are plenty of bluegrass folks who can enjoy the way Charles Mingus or Miles Davis played, but if that adventurous approach is being applied in bluegrass, I haven't heard it. Post-Monroe, acoustic country has consistently trended smoother/cleaner/faster.  I happen to love the younger, highly "technical" players, and frankly envy them; there are some I could listen to -- and do -- all day long.  But I get the feeling Jenny has a limited appetite for that.  She's just not that into whipping out the old cock, so to speak, at solo time.  She'd sooner fill a bar with one note and try to make it say something than flit around a scale with ten of them.  When she does something playful or outside, she doesn't underscore it with the musical equivalent of the punchline from the redneck's-last-words joke:  "Hey, look at this!"  It's a whole different way of playing country, and I really like it.   

Our trades back and forth over the kitchen table consisted mostly of my learning back-up for a vocal original of hers, then her learning an old hillbilly tune that was plaguing my mind that week.  Besides being off-balance in the trivial way that we didn't work as much on my originals, it looks to me now like I missed an opportunity to poke into a dozen styles that are obscure to me.  Next time I move to Jenny's neighborhood, I want to learn some 1930s Brazilian music, and (to paraphrase Merle Haggard slightly) to hell with the country.  But I got so much this time.  It almost doesn't matter what script you're working from, when you work with someone that good.  As long as your ears are alert, you're gaining.

If you're still reading what I didn't set out to write -- a ten-thousand word encomium -- then the pay-off is: we're wrapping up our Barbes stint with two more shows, May 26 and June 2, both Tuesdays.  (Conceivably, we could do another in July, but as of now it doesn't look like it.)  Our last show there was weakly attended, probably because it was unadvertised.  So here's the ad, folks.  It's coming to an end.  Come from Buffalo if you have to.  All the fiddle music, with half the testosterone.  Accidents thrown in free.