Jazz-Scene Queen: Jenny Scheinman plays everything from avant to Jones-style jazz.

Strings Attached

Frisell and Co. descend on the Raven

By Greg Cahill

For a downtown jazz-scene queen, Jenny Scheinman sure does get around. Scheinman may be one of the most listened-to violinists on the planet, thanks to her contribution to the chart-topping cafe jazz album Come Away with Me–the multiplatinum 2002 release by sultry chanteuse Norah Jones that has sold more than 18 million copies–and its blockbuster 2004 follow up, Feels Like Home. But you’ll be excused if Scheinman’s name doesn’t strike a chord. She spends a fair share of her time playing with the mostly Bay Area collective of avant-jazzers that includes Charlie Hunter (who helped introduce Jones on his 2001 CD Songs from the Analog Playground), Scott Amendola and Nels Cline, among others.

On Feb. 3, Scheinman joins violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts to back up guitarist and bandleader Bill Frisell at the Raven Theater in Healdsburg for a night of inspired experimental jazz. Calling themselves the 858 Quartet, this foursome will perform songs from their sole album, Richter 858, a fearless set of guitar and violin duos inspired by the abstract paintings of German painter Gerhard Richter and first released in 2002 as a companion CD to a limited-edition art book about his work. Last month, Richter 858 finally had its commercial release on the Songlines label.

The quartet’s songs are built on simple repeated figures that serve as a framework around which the players can improvise.

The results are often eerie and always fascinating. In concert you never know where the quartet will travel.

Each of the string players in the quartet has had a long and fruitful association with the highly diverse Frisell, who has an uncanny knack for blending American roots and jazz; Kang can be heard on his innovative 1996 Bill Frisell Quartet project and Scheinman popped up on his 2003 world-music foray, The Intercontinentals.

“I love performing with Bill,” explains Scheinman by phone from her New York loft apartment. “Sometimes we’ll stop in the middle of a set and play a bunch of old fiddle tunes like ‘Cluck Old Hen’ and ‘Blackberry Blossom’–songs that I played with my dad when I was a kid.”

But the discs that have caught the ear of many critics are Scheinman’s own CDs, especially 2003’s The Rabbi’s Lover, which spans the sonic realm from haunting klezmer melodies to red-hot fusion, and 2004’s more mature Shalagaster, featuring some of the most scintillating music released last year. Both CDs are on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.

“I guess that I’ve played a lot of different kinds of music just in making a living and never felt all that attached to any one style,” she says. “I think that musicians in my generation–and especially people younger than me–have been exposed to so much music from around the world that it has become very integrated in our lives.

“It really has changed the sort of music that we write, reference and play.”

Bill Frisell’s 858 Quartet perform Thursday, Feb. 3, at the Raven Theater. 115 North St., Healdsburg. 7:30pm. $18­$22. 707.433.6335.

Spin Du Jour

Miles Davis, ‘My Funny Valentine’ (Columbia/Legacy)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this classic album captures the second Miles Davis Quintet–Davis (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), George Coleman (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums)–at the height of their powers in a live date appropriately recorded on Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, 1964, at New York’s Lincoln Center. This is the first time this album has been available on CD, though the tracks were included in the recent box set Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis, 1963­1964. And while the love of your life might appreciate the dreamy title ballad, coaxed through Davis’ Harmon mute, the five tracks on My Funny Valentine showcase five truly astounding improvisators–one of the great, if not the greatest, jazz bands of the era–stretching out and exploring music in a recording that many regard as the high-water mark of Davis’ bluesy ballad period.

–G.C.

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Tin Ears: Nickelback’s seventh-generation alt-pap is bad enough the first time.

Same Old Song

Do bands have the right to copy themselves?

By Sara Bir

Mikey Smith needs to chill out. Yeah, he’s young, he’s perceptive, he’s passionate about creativity and integrity. But there comes a point when it’s best to throw your hands up and walk away from the line that you’ve drawn in the sand. Mikey needs to forget about Nickelback.

I myself was blissfully unaware of Nickelback until Smith’s anti-Nickelback crusade reached a breaking point and became the subject of a feature on NPR’s All Things Considered. Here’s the gist of it: Smith, a 21-year-old Canadian, noticed a disarming resemblance between two songs recorded by the band Nickelback, 2001’s “How You Remind Me” and 2003’s “Someday.” To prove his point, Smith made some slight alterations to sync the songs together and posted them on his website, where you can hear them playing side by side.

Here’s what Smith has to say on his site: “Nickelback, you lazy, talentless bunch of wankers. What, did you think nobody would notice that you’re recycling your hideous dirge and selling it all over again to your deluded fan base? You bastards . . . you’re releasing songs that are exactly the same as ones you recorded earlier.”

For those who do not care for Nickelback’s brand of seventh-generation alt-rock, listening to Smith’s experiment can be painful–it’s basically Nickelback squared.

Both songs have the same strumming guitar openings, the same gruff bleeding-heart introspective lyrics, the same predictable shifts of dynamics, crunching of guitars and rocking out of drums. (You can easily assess this for yourself by Googling “Nickelback”; Smith’s song-splicing site is tellingly the first entry that comes up after the official Nickelback site.)

For the sake of argument, let’s give Nickelback the benefit of the doubt and assume–based on the perpetual overabundance of sincerity in the vocal stylings of lead singer Chad Kroeger–that the band composed “Someday” with the full intention of it being its own unique work and not a quick rehash of a previously successful formula. If this is the case, Nickelback is only guilty of perpetuating a longstanding pop-music tradition: appropriating one’s own song. There are literally countless examples, many of them much-loved hits and works of true genius.

Let’s start with Leadbelly. The dude was bad-ass for sure, but half of his songs sound exactly alike–so why were they all so good? Bill Haley and His Comets hit it big with “Rock around the Clock” in 1955, the guitar solo for which is instantly recognizable. Interestingly enough, the solo is also heard on 1952’s “Rock This Joint,” recorded by the Saddlemen, an earlier incarnation of Bill Haley and His Comets. Neil Young went so far as to have two cuts–“Train of Love” and “Western Hero”–sharing the same melody but different lyrics on Sleeps with Angels.

This is not taking into account another time-tested phenomenon, that of going the distance and copying other artists. In the early ’70s, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” was famously just a little bit too close for comfort to the Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine.” There’s a little song called “Justify My Love,” whose drumbeat was lifted from Public Enemy’s instrumental segue “Security of the First World.” And there’s the wonderfully persistent rumor that a pre-fame Kurt Cobain stayed up late listening to Meet the Beatles over and over again before penning “About a Girl.”

There’s no shame in using particular variations on an especially great theme. Nickelback guitarist Mike Kroeger told the Cleveland Free Times, “When you have a distinct style, you run the risk of sounding similar.” He’s got a point there. How much more distinctive a sound can you have than Bo Diddley’s? And how many Bo Diddley songs sound very similar? And if all Nickelback songs sound the same, what does it matter? It keeps Nickelback fans happy and detractors like me running for the hills.

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Back Catalogue: Everything old is new again for jazz pianist Mose Allison.

Confluence of Influence

Mose Allison goes with status quo

By Bruce Robinson

Count Mose Allison among the adherents of the “if it ain’t broke” school. Now a spunky 77, the veteran jazz pianist sees little reason to do anything much differently than he has for most of the past half-century.

Married for 52 years, and a Long Island resident since 1963, Allison continues to tour regularly, if not quite as frequently as he once did. “As long as I can get work, I enjoy doing it,” he drawls by phone from his home a few days before returning to the West Coast for a short string of club dates. “The travel is getting to be a little more of a pain, but once I get to the place and sit down at the piano, I always have some fun, try to get as much out of it as I can, and try to make the music happen. And that takes a lot of concentration; it doesn’t happen on its own. So it’s a challenge every night.”

When he faces that challenge in SSU’s Evert B. Person Theatre on Feb. 7, Allison will be flanked by drummer George Marsh and bassist Mel Graves, both members of the university’s music faculty. But this is no quick pickup gig. “I’ve been playing with Mel for 25 or 30 years,” Allison says, “and with George, almost that long. We go way back. I’ve played with them once or twice a year, every year for a long time.” The trio will also work together for a three-night stand at Yoshi’s in Oakland following the university date.

Will they gather to practice first? “I don’t rehearse,” Allison scoffs. “Jazz is not supposed to be rehearsed. A lot of people do it, but the jazz part is the part you can’t rehearse.”

Allison’s most recent recordings, a pair of live sets taped in London in 2000, show him romping through his own memorable compositions and a handful of standards, with his casually ferocious post-bop piano breaks assuming a stronger role than his offhand vocal stylings. But he emphatically rebuts a suggestion that his instrumental work is getting increased emphasis.

“No, man, I’ve been doing the same amount of instrumental versus vocal stuff for 40 years,” he declares, a hipster energy melding with the soft Southern cadences that reveal his youth in rural Mississippi. “It’s just that the record companies wouldn’t record my piano playing for several years. They were only interested in vocal stuff. So if you only heard the early records and you come to see me, you’re gonna be surprised.”

Idiosyncratic original tunes, such as “Your Mind Is on Vacation,” “Ever Since the World Ended” and “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy” have been part of Allison’s concert repertoire for years, but lately he’s enjoyed reaching deeper into his back catalogue. “There’s a lotta songs that I feel have made a comment about something that’s actually happening right now but that I did a long time ago, so I’m trying to do some of those tunes,” he explains.

With more than 150 compositions to his credit, Allison rarely writes anymore, and feels little drive to do so. “I’ve expressed most of my attitudes, and I don’t really have anything new to say,” he shrugs. “Some of the tunes I do now that I wrote 35 years ago, people think I just wrote ’em.

“Besides, somebody asked Thelonius Monk one time when I was around him if he was writing any new songs, and he said, ‘Man, I’m waiting for somebody to listen to the old songs.’ That’s my position. I’ve written a lotta songs that nobody’s every heard of.”

For Allison, writing is such a personal process that he flatly says he has never collaborated on a song. But given the unusual confluence of influences he embodies, maybe that’s not surprising. “I always tell people that my inspirations are the idioms of the Mississippi Delta, which is skeptical, ironic; the jazz musician lingo; and then on top of that, [being a former] English major. Those three things influence a lot of my songs.”

When it comes to tracking the ever increasing number of cover versions of his better-known material, which has been covered by such notables as Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison and the Who, among others, Allison laughs a bit ruefully, “I try to, because I’m supposed to get paid for that.” But beyond that, he is not invested in how others deal with his tunes.

“If they credit me with writing the song and pay me the legal price, I’m happy. I don’t care what anybody does with my songs other than that, because I do what I want with other people’s songs, pretty much.”

Mose Allison appears with Mel Graves and George Marsh on Monday, Feb. 7, at the Evert B. Person Theatre. SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. 8pm. $8-$15. 707.664.2353.

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.