Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Terry Jenoure: Musician, visual artist, scholar ...
Terry Jenoure © 2024 Michael O'Bannon
Terry Jenoure is an enigmatic figure in creative music with years-long gaps in her discography. Beginning in the early 1980s, Jenoure was on the rise. She shared the front line with Leroy Jenkins in his electric string band, Sting, which produced the undervalued Urban Blues, and was an integral member of the ensembles that recorded four of the five extended works that comprise John Carter’s epochal Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music.
However, her transition to leader stalled. Give You This, her song-based 1987 debut, sought a niche in the emergent space mixing jazz, soul, and pop, but fell through the cracks. Much the same can be said of her 1992 collaboration with German woodwinds player Sibylle Pomorin, Auguries of Speed, a collection of pieces based on Anne Waldman poems. After Looks Like Me, an overlooked 2006 album documenting an improvisation-privileging approach to chamber music with Helios String Quartet and bassist Sebastian Gramss, there was another lengthy silence.
There has been a spate of self-produced recordings in the last four years that provide an in-depth (re)introduction to Jenoure. The 2021 triple CD Portal features three groups: an all-strings trio with cellist Wayne Smith and bassist Avery Sharpe; a duo with pianist Angelica Sanchez; and a trio with bassist Joe Fonda and drummer Reggie Nicholson. The work with Sanchez inspired two subsequent volumes: Dakota in 2023 and Miracle on the South Rim in 2024. The depth of interaction on all three titles is more palpable than on most improvised music discs, which further begs the question of why there were long hiatuses from recording.
The answer is: music is just part of her journey. Terry Jenoure is a polymath: a musician, a visual artist, a writer, a scholar, a gallery director, a university professor and program director. As varied as these may seem, they revolve around improvisation, as practiced on the bandstand, in the studio, in the classroom, and in daily life. Depending upon one’s vantage, Jenoure is a respected scholar and educator for her research of African Americans artists in academia and for her work in diversifying arts education in public schools; or she is a visual artist whose work spans illustrations and soft sculpture; or she is a unique violinist and vocalist. The big picture enhances what we have heard to date.
Since childhood, education has been Jenoure’s driving force, “education is the key” being her parents’ mantra. She began playing the violin at 8, her father determining that The High School of Music and Art would provide her the best academic preparation for college. At 12 or 13, she began taking lessons from the violinist Gayle Dixon, whose family lived in the same 14-story building in the Bronx River Projects. Jenoure was admitted to Music and Art, where, in her senior year, she encountered a new teacher – Yusef Lateef – who introduced students studying the European canon to music from other cultures. She also discovered the recordings of John Coltrane, spending hours to approximate the spirit of his improvisations on violin.
Academically advanced, Jenoure graduated from high school at 16, receiving a scholarship to The College of Wooster in Ohio to study philosophy. She spent her second and third years studying in Beirut, Lebanon, during which she travelled to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, which was followed by a trimester in Nantes, France. “I was introduced to new worlds of music and was feeling an insatiable appetite for new ideas and experiences,” she later wrote in the preface of her groundbreaking study, Navigators: African American Musicians, Dancers, and Visual Artists in Academe (State University Press of New York; 2000). “I wondered if there was some way to blend all these new sounds I was hearing with my desire to improvise and experiment.”
Jenoure did not begin playing music publicly until she moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, after her undergraduate studies. She had put down the violin, having no interest in the European canon. Instead, Jenoure mostly played guitar and sang, becoming “the girl singer” in a couple of local bands. In the mid-70s, New England was becoming a jazz hub, with Archie Shepp teaching at University of Massachusetts, Ray Copeland at Hampshire College, and Alan Shorter joining Bill Dixon and Milford Graves at Bennington College. “Alan was older than us,” Jenoure recently recalled. “We thought of him as old. By we, I mean Brandon Ross, Steve McCraven, and Brandon’s brother, Kevin.”
Even though Jenoure was playing in Shepp’s big band by the end of the 1970s, the violin was still not her sole focus. “I had side jobs, straight jobs, and I always had interests in ideas outside of playing,” she explained. “I really wanted a Masters in Philosophy, but I didn’t get into the program, so I ended up doing a Masters in Education and then a Doctorate in Education. So, I was doing a lot of different things, which I need to do to be grounded.” Visual art was also in the mix “ever since I was a kid. I remember about 10 or 15 years ago my father saying, ‘I always thought you were going to be a visual artist.’ It was surprising to hear him say that, but visual art has been something I have done. I was always doing it. My father bought one of those antique secretaries, which was painted white because it was all beat up, and I just painted designs all over it. When I was a philosophy major, my minor was art, so I was painting and doing ceramics.”
Even though Jenoure was in Shepp’s big band, she was reading parts. Passing through Amherst, Henry Threadgill suggested to Jenoure that Leroy Jenkins was someone with whom she might want to study and work. “This is ‘78 or ‘79. I contacted Leroy, went down to the city, and he invited me to come over and play, to hear me. He gave me something to read and improvise with. I think it was ‘Now’s the Time” by Charlie Parker. Hmm, ok. So, I read the part and then who knows what I played after that. I went to him two or three times, and then he invited me to be the second violinist in Sting.”
Feeling constrained by the avant-garde label, Jenkins formed Sting to articulate a contemporary blend of genres. With the exception of percussionist Thurman Barker, Jenkins enlisted younger players like guitarists Ross and James Emery and bassist Alonzo Gardner, in addition to Jenoure. Their materials spanned spirituals, funk, and post-modern contours. The Penguin Guide to Jazz opined that Sting had “an impact not unlike that of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time ... but Jenkins redeploys the harmonic and rhythmic emphases differently. Where Prime Time can be bludgeoningly illogical, Sting can sound, as [on Urban Blues], perversely rational.”
“I think the way we interpreted Leroy’s music made a big difference,” Jenoure reflected. “Alonzo Gardner was from somewhere in the South, a real funk and R&B player who improvised as well, so he brought this taste to the music. And then [Barker’s replacement] Kamal Sabir, who was my husband at the time, had a real different background than Thurman. He had played with Roberta Flack, he did funk, he was Ornette’s drummer for about ten years, along with Denardo – he had a wide vocabulary. I think the band really shaped where Leroy went. I think that was smart of him. He used what the band had to offer. He had different sorts of vocals he wanted me to do.
“I would say that Leroy was instrumental in pushing me forward. I played parts in that band and soloed. Leroy was a very impulsive person – not in terms of his thinking, but his energy. When we performed, we’d play the head, he would solo, and then he would point to me to play. How am I supposed to play after Leroy? He wasn’t about protocol, like you play last or anything like that. I was the weak link as far as I was concerned in terms of improvising, I guess I played with Leroy for about ten years. A few years in, we were at this performance – I think we were in Canada. It was intermission and we went into the dressing room, and he said, ‘You smoked me tonight.’ It made me incredibly happy, because I had worked really hard. I felt really energized by that.”
Considering Jenoure’s contributions to the music of both Jenkins and John Carter is an occasion to point out the two composers’ respective evocations of African American music prior to jazz. (Also parenthetically noteworthy is that they were both public school educators before pursuing their music fulltime.) Echoes of the music made in the fields and churches, on front porches and in roadhouses reverberate through their work, though Urban Blues is something of a loft-era Saturday night function while Carter’s magnus opus is an aural correlative of August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle. In an art form where ephemerality is central to its essence, the monumentality of Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music was, from an outside perspective, a given even when it was only partially realized.
For Jenoure, however, working with Carter was about something more immediate than making history. “Maybe it’s unfortunate on my part,” Jenoure confessed, “but I have a hard time digesting it in that way, because it was something else for me. It was personally historic for many reasons. I loved how John would send me what I considered to be complex vocal material and trust my musical abilities. I know a lot of vocalists who don’t read and I wasn’t really used to reading vocal material, but he sent it to me as a musician and I learned the parts, and I really felt good about that. I trusted him and I trusted me.
“He was also my father’s age and he reminded me of my father a lot. There was a point there when I had already gotten my Master's degree and I was in the city and doing a lot of music and floundering and digging and doing all kinds of stuff, and he said, ‘You know, Jenoure, you need to go back and get your doctorate.’ I said, ‘You know, you sound like my father.’ He said, ‘You have an obligation to do this,’ and he laid this heavy thing on me. As a Black woman, I had this obligation. Other than my father, he was the first person to put the path I was on in that kind of perspective.
“He would also write violin parts that would be very high register, very fast with a lot of notes, and I would be struggling, and I would say, ‘John, I don’t know if I can do this.’ He said, ‘That’s just the thing you do when you go up into the high register with the bow.’ ‘Oh, that,’ I would say. So, I felt like he wrote for me as it went on. And the other thing I learned from him was how to assemble people who had a heart connection.”
The other important figure in Jenoure’s development to emerge in this period was music theorist and educator Roland Wiggins, with whom she studied in the late 1970s. By then, Wiggins’s doctorate students included Bill Barron, Billy Taylor, and Lateef, who introduced Wiggins to John Coltrane, who sought counsel from Wiggins about the direction of his music after A Love Supreme. Thelonious Monk also sought out Wiggins, who called his approach to music theory “the atonal method,” which is not to be confused with the Second Viennese School – it relates more to the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, of which Wiggins was an authorized instructor. Instead, Wiggins advocated knowing the rules of European tonal music well enough to break them and achieve individuality and honest communication.
Having already earned her Masters, Jenoure began sitting in on Wiggins’ classes at Hampshire College in the early ‘80s. “He would talk about permutations in music, and combinations of notes,” she explained. For example, he would say you have these let’s say nine notes for which there are 32,376 or a set number of permutations of those nine notes. So, we learned to play them in different rhythms and different combinations. We were excited by that. What would that open up? Once you practice like that, when you go to play, you’re not thinking about anything; you just let it go. You let the computer work for you.
“Some of us were excited by that. Some of the young kids were like, ‘What if we don’t want to practice like that?’ And Roland would say, “Well, then you won’t have access to that. It’s that simple.” He talked about improvisation being intellectual material and intellectual engagement. He talked about African culture embodying that, that it belongs to this experience that we’re having. I started thinking about all that, and how improvisation reflects what has happened to us culturally over these hundreds of years, and how we express it. So, I started writing in New York. I had about 30 pages of free writing; and when I went back to Amherst for my Doctorate, that became the foundation for it. I began to interview Black professors in the academy to find out how improvisation shaped the way they teach, the way they think, the way they operate in the institution. That was the premise.
“I started thinking about these three components – how interaction works; how the need to define self works; and how transcendence works, the holy ghost, trance – and how they formed an understanding of how you teach, who you want to be in the academy. I wanted to know how three aspects, these three principles – interaction, definition, transcendence – work. It turned into Navigators. This thinking has shaped a lot of the stuff that I do.
“Now, here’s the thing: I’m hearing a lot of stuff, where people are saying something is improvised. I’m getting to where Yusef [Lateef] was at. I had finished working with the chair of my Doctoral committee. Her name is Sonia Nieto, who is a rock star in multi-cultural education, mostly bilingual, a Nuyorican like myself. You work with her and then she lets you give your dissertation to the rest of the committee. At this point, she says I’m ready to share it with the committee. So, I asked Yusef if he would be interested in being on the committee. ‘Yes, sister Terry, send me a copy,’ he says. I sent it, and after a week, he gets back to me and says, ‘I would really like to be on this committee but I need you not to use the word “jazz”,’ because he didn’t use the word ‘jazz.’ I told him I couldn’t. I had interviewed six people numerous times and, regardless about how I feel about the word, that’s the language they use, and this is how I’m shaping it.
“It’s my tension, too,” Jenoure admitted about her apprehensions about the four-letter word. “And I’m getting to the point where ‘improvisation’ is problematic for me. A quick story. I taught for 18 years at Lesley University graduate education program, training teachers to use the arts in their classrooms. They would send me around the country, so once a month I would travel. I go somewhere down south and they hated me because this was during the Huckabee campaign. I’m being sent to really rough white southern Republican neighborhoods to teach multicultural education. At the end of the course, I would always talk about how a really good teacher is a really good improviser, and here’s why. I usually got really good evaluations, but in the evaluation, someone said they didn’t like Dr. Jenoure, and her talking about improvisation was her just pulling it out of her ass. I realized that a lot of this is lost on people because they think improvisation is just whatever ... so now you can see why I love Roland Wiggins talking about that hard work.”
Jenoure readily agrees that academia and artistry are often at odds. “They are,” she acknowledged. “I love the rigor and the formality of the academy that I miss in everyday exchanges with musicians. I get frustrated in both circles. I get frustrated with musicians. I get frustrated with the academy. None of it is perfect for me.” Subsequently, Jenoure is scrutinous in identifying musicians with whom she wants to work. She wants to dive deep. Portal is a case in point, the project having added resonance from being initiated during the pandemic. For Jenoure, the project was a way for her to describe through sound her experiences with prayer. “At first, the heart quiets itself,” she wrote for the liner notes, “then it names what needs healing, and finally it releases its potent Love, the ultimate force of change.” “I’m just a lover of prayer – there you go,” she responded when her words were read back to her.
Although there were no rehearsals for any of the three groups, Jenoure approached each one differently. “I had a direction for each of the pieces for the trio with Avery [Sharpe] and Wayne [Smith],” she detailed, “very brief graphic scores. Avery is not a person who usually works in this way. He’s a very traditional jazz player, but I had a feeling about the three of us. I had only worked with Angelica once before in an ensemble a few years before, but I knew that I could bring words from my journals that I could sing. I knew I could do that with her, along with a couple of directions. The piece for Flame with Joe [Fonda] and Reggie [Nicholson] is completely improvised. So, three different approaches, but it’s all one take. I couldn’t do that with just anyone. The hardest part and the longest part of that project was figuring out the who, not the what or how.”
After Portal, Jenoure received a grant from South Arts and New England Foundation for the Arts to assemble together an ensemble for a week of rehearsals, and recording the results of the process. She decided to put together the three of groups from Portal, despite initial reservations about having two basses in the ensemble.
“I put together a work based on some letters that my father gave me before he died, letters from his father, whom he called Papa,” Jenoure explained. “These were letters Papa wrote to my grandmother. They were both Jamaican and living in Harlem. My grandfather went to Canada in the summer to visit relatives from Jamaica who had moved there. He couldn’t get back because he didn’t have ‘papers.’ It’s a story I’ve heard all my life, but I hadn’t really thought about it. It was just a story my father told about my grandfather not having papers and being detained. A few months before he died, my father gave me these two letters written to my grandmother, and they are heartbreaking. My grandfather is at the border; he’s in some hotel; he can’t get back home. It was probably two of many letters that he wrote. I built an hour-long piece around them and called it Letters from Papa. I sing his words verbatim in this five-movement piece. That was a magical week: we did a workshop, a performance, and we’ve done a couple of things since then.
“That’s when I really saw the potential of working with Angelica. I had these sections of the piece where I would be singing the letter without written notes and she would be free, also. We did it a few times, and each one was different, but they were all so rich. I knew it was something that could be developed. After that, we did Dakota, which was my attempt to work with text in a different way, both pre-composed and spontaneously composed. Miracle on the South Rim was related to my residency at the Grand Canyon, where I created poems and photographs. We were playing at Firehouse 12 and I knew I could just bring this to her the night of the performance and tell her what we were doing and she could do it.”
“For me, relationships are everything, Jenoure concluded. “I would rather work with someone for whom I feel a love, a compassion, and a kindness toward me and toward the other ensemble members, and not care what their instrument was. I would take that; a strong player who is kind and considerate and plays the spoons, instead of the greatest drummer whose nastiness I have to overlook. I can’t overlook that. The other thing is that I totally trust my intuition about everything. I trust me. That’s it.”