As I’m sitting in the Saturn Café talking to Jesse Scheinin, his eyes suddenly shoot upward, as if intercepting an invisible signal above us. I concentrate hard for a moment, trying to drown out the conversations around us and the clatter of dishes and silverware, and realize he has tuned in to the sound of Bon Iver’s “Lump Sum” drifting across the room from the jukebox.
Scheinin’s impish face almost always seems on the verge of a smile, and when he realizes I’ve heard it, he lights up once again.
“I really like Bon Iver,” he says.
I tell him I’m not at all surprised, since the first time I heard Scheinin’s song “Bubbles,” that’s who immediately came to mind. Suddenly his smile turns serious and he looks at me with complete puzzlement.
“Oh, you thought of Bon Iver? Yeah? That’s interesting.”
I’m taken aback, since to me the comparison is obvious, from the gentle pulse of the opening da-da-dos to the slow acoustic burn to his quirky, high-pitched vocals. Though Scheinin’s sound is anchored in the instrumental jazz he grew up with, it reaches across genres to the acoustic-indie sound popularized in the last few years by Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine and Ray LaMontagne.
But from the way Scheinin is looking at me, it’s obvious that either: a) he doesn’t agree that he sounds like that; b) he doesn’t realize that he sounds like that; or c) he’s really not sure at all what he sounds like.
He nods his head. “Cool.”
The answer, it turns out, is c. And Scheinin, at just 21, is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man in transition.
Voice Lesson
Growing up in Santa Cruz, Scheinin was playing the clarinet in the school band by fourth grade, and within a few years had moved on to the instrument he coveted, the tenor sax. By high school, he was a talent to watch in the Bay Area jazz scene, playing in honor bands and trained by the likes of Joshua Redman. He was, by his own admission, a jazz purist.
But upon moving to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music, his perspective began to shift. He started jamming with folk musicians and bluegrass musicians; he joined a rock band called the Boston Boys. Then, in 2009, he got the singer-songwriter bug. It seemed innocuous enough at first.
“I was trying to write with some other songwriters,” says Scheinin. “But I was having a hard time ever getting it done. When you’re collaborating with someone, and you’re sending stuff back and forth, it just takes forever sometimes. So I decided to write the lyrics myself.”
By that summer, he was not only writing lyrics but singing. And it wasn’t so easy to step out from behind the saxophone and up to the mic.
“It’s definitely a whole new level of being exposed, singing and writing lyrics,” he says. “I just don’t have as much confidence with it, and especially then I didn’t have as much confidence with it. I didn’t know if it was good or not.”
He still doesn’t seem to realize that his oddball vocals are part of what gives his songs their strange appeal. He’s knows he’s a gifted instrumentalist, but finds his vocal style lacking when measured against his idols.
“I love Stevie Wonder,” he says. “He’s my favorite, but I’m never going to be able to sing like him. I love Nick Drake, but I’m never going to be able to sing like him.”
Jazz Strikes Back
Even under the influence of pop’s siren song, Scheinin hasn’t turned his back on jazz. Instead, he’s sewn it into the lining of his music. The Fall Asleep EP he released earlier this year is a good example—the title song is a lullaby backed by a nine-piece band, including five saxophones. Featuring vocals from Margaret Glaspy, it’s a sonic hybrid of jazz and roots music, with lyrics that are all indie rock: “Someone press play/So I can be on my way.”
“I’m still a jazz musician. I’m still a saxophonist. It’s essential that I don’t think I’m something else that I’ve just been doing in the past two years,” he says. “This is what I want to do with my project, but I still want to be a great jazz saxophonist. I’m still very much working on that.”
Saxophonist-vocalists don’t have a great track record in pop music (“Kool and the Gang,” says Scheinin with a sigh). Horn players tend to be sidemen, not singers. But in jazz, it’s a different story.
“I don’t know about saxophonists as much, but there’s definitely a history of jazz instrumentalists who also sang. Dizzy Gillespie sang. I like the way Louis Armstrong played trumpet and sang. I love Chet Baker, the way he did it,” says Scheinin.
And jazz has provided a blueprint for the music he’s making, even if it’s hard to classify.
“I like the way jazz musicians, when jazz was starting out, took pop music and the sound of the current time and then spread it out and used it. That was their language, that’s what they grew up hearing. They took that and did something way more with it,” he says. “I would like to do that, take what I’m experiencing as any person my age in the 21st century, and take that and do something more with it, spread it out and delve into it.”
Right now, the ideas are coming to him fast and furious, and his musical vision has changed so much in the last 36 months that it makes it hard for him to get it down on record.
“I made this EP [in December of 2009], and it was right when I first started singing and trying to figure out how to blend these different things together. I recorded in a nice studio, and then for a couple of months I was working on overdubs. Maybe I just worked on it too much, I don’t know. At a certain point I felt like I didn’t like it that much anymore, and then I never did anything with it,” he says.
He doesn’t like having to finish something when he’s wanting to do something else, but neither is he mourning the loss of transition projects like that one.
“If it was great, I’m sure I’d still like it,” he says.
But Is It Jazz?
Dann Zinn is a longtime Bay Area jazz musician who teaches saxophone, music history and other subjects at UC Berkeley, Cal State East Bay, the Dave Brubeck Institute and the Jazz School. Scheinin took private lessons from him as a teenager, and Zinn remembers that even though he played straight jazz back then, Scheinin seemed to be planning a musical direction of his own.
“He’s very, very talented, brilliant at what he does. He has a free flowing approach to the whole thing,” says Zinn. “Even as a kid, he was very good at developing melodic ideas in interesting ways.”
Zinn isn’t surprised to hear where Scheinin is taking his career; in fact, he says genre-bending is becoming increasingly popular among his students.
“It’s really a thing now,” he says, pointing to artists like Julian Pollack, Steps Ahead’s Bendik Hofseth and the Le Boeuf Brothers—Remy and Pascal, both of whom went to Scheinin’s high school, Pacific Collegiate—as examples of young artists who’ve made a name for themselves tweaking the traditional boundaries between jazz and pop.
“You look around, and nobody really listens to jazz. If you want to make a connection with people, you can’t just do your thing and play Giant Steps and wait for people to love you. Because they won’t,” says Zinn.
While his predictions for the future of jazz music as popular entertainment are downright dire, he sees the possibility of this new generation transcending the genre.
“Guys like Jesse, they might change it,” he says. “Guys like him are going to find a way to have the best of both worlds.”
Serious Business
While on break from Berklee, Scheinin has set up several gigs in the Bay Area, including the homecoming show at Kuumbwa this week. He’s just learning the business side of the music, reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and making his first real cold calls.
“This is going to be a packed week. We have shows and clinics and stuff every day. So I was making a lot of calls, trying to call people up and speak in a good voice and stuff, and sound confident,” he says.
In Boston, his band mostly plays house shows, and it’s difficult to break into the scene. But here he has years of relationships to draw on, and plays high profile shows around the Bay Area.
“I’m very lucky for that. I wouldn’t be able to play these gigs right now if it wasn’t’ for the connections I made when I was younger. People are more likely to pay attention to you when you’re a 17-year-old or a 16-year-old especially. Cause I looked really young when I was 16, so I think people took notice.”
He still looks really young, of course. And there can be a downside to that. As we’re sitting in the Saturn Café, I ask him if it’s harder to get people to take him seriously, and he gets that sly smile again.
“I don’t know…I feel like maybe 21 is the age where people start taking you seriously,” he says.
Then pushing his finger against the table for mock dramatic emphasis, he demands, “’Take me seriously.’ Print it.”
JESSE SCHEININ BAND plays Thursday, Jan. 20 at 7pm at Kuumbwa, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets $12.60 ($24.60 with dinner). www.kuumbwajazz.org.
