Jackie + Jenny @ Joe's
Jackie Greene, who I caught at Joe's Pub (NYC) Sunday night, is a great-looking twenty-six-year-old Californian who could pass for a decade younger. Greene's claim to fame these days is his recent recruitment in Phil Lesh & Friends, a Grateful Dead repertory band led by its former bassist, and the club was a little loopy with assertive Dead fans eager to hear Greene's version of the canon. And while Greene, accompanied by guitarist Tim Bluhm, delivered perfectly adequate renditions of "Friend of the Devil" and "Sugaree," the problem was that his original material, which he performed on guitar, piano, and harmonica, was equally adequate except not, you know, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Songs like "About Cell Block #9," "Farewell, So Long, Goodbye," and "The Rusty Nail" sounded unlived-in even as Greene cranked up the passion for these old-fashioned verses featuring jealous rages and do-wrong mamas. His records are a little more convincing, and he'll definitely make a certain type of Deadhead happy.
Same venue, following night, completely different story. My admiration for violinist Jenny Scheinman grows with every Tuesday she performs at her usual hangout, Barbès. But tonight she was enjoying a bigger stage and better sound system with a quartet, performing an unusually personal form of jazz-rock definitely in the spirit, if far from the letter, of the early ultraexperimental Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd, in the case of one spacious epic). Scheinman was accompanied by her own low-key rock star, guitar experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco, along with the nervously urgent rhythm section of bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black. And verily these cats did smoke. Scheinman has performed country, jazz, pop, and samba with the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell, and the Hot Club of San Francisco. All these experiences appear to blend together in compositions both serenely pastoral and anxiously urban. Yet it always sounded intensely intimate, of the moment, and resolutely nostalgia-free. I can't wait to hear what she does next.