Though she has won awards from jazz publications and been included for five consecutive years in Downbeat magazine’s list of Top Ten Overall Violinists, Jenny Scheinman does little on her two latest albums to invite easy categorization as a jazz player. In fact, her recent instrumental project Crossing the Field seems better described as a marriage of chamber composition and lyric improvisation, sometimes driven, and sometimes not, by a jazz rhythmic engine. And her eponymous August release, Jenny Scheinman, goes a step further by diminishing or even removing the imprint of the violin.

On the latter album, her voice is the center of attention, in settings that evoke downtown cabarets more than the Village Vanguard and other upscale jazz venues where she has become a steady draw. Here the feeling is earthy and raw on four original tunes and covers by the likes of Jimmy Reed, Lucinda Williams, and Tom Waits, with a bare-bones trio laying down greasy slide-guitar blues, roadhouse shuffles, and alternative rock, all of which complement the innocent worldliness that Scheinman conveys as a singer.

Perhaps the greatest surprise is that the artist herself insists that some of her best fiddle work can be heard on what people will inevitably refer to as her vocal record. “Some of my favorite violin solos that I’ve ever taken are on that album,” she says. “I do also like the solos on Crossing the Field, but ‘Johnsburgh, Illinois,’ ‘The Green,’ and ‘Rebecca’s Song’ are me at my best as a player. They’re very unflashy and modest, I guess, but there’s also something that to my ear sounds really emotional.”

These moments illuminate Scheinman’s aesthetic as an instrumentalist, composer, and now as a vocalist as well. Her music, in all its manifestations, seeks the substance of the composition, whether it’s a finger-picked folk tune or one of the orchestral pieces she wrote and arranged for Crossing the Field—and, having found that substance, examines it perceptively rather than treating it as a launch pad for bravura elaborations.

So it is that Crossing the Field opens with “Born into This,” nudged gently through a medium-slow tempo by a rhythm section that includes jazz stalwarts Bill Frisell on guitar and Jason Moran on piano, with strings reflecting on four-note ostinato that varies through a melody that’s often outlined in simple, languid harmonies. This gives way after about two-and-a-half minutes to an open section through which Scheinman solos with a lustrous tone and a thoughtful sense of structure, never in a hurry and rising to her highest note only to glisten momentarily at the top of the chord played by the strings as they return.

“A lot of violin repertoire challenges a player to explore the high register and the fast stuff,” Scheinman says. “Sometimes there is a joy in that, and when I hear somebody who is really fluent and fluid athletically, that is enjoyable. However, usually that isn’t as satisfying to me as something that’s more basically musical, like a melody that works, that’s lyrical, and that connects to something more human. The violin can do a lot. It’s like the saxophone: You can play fast and clear, high and low, where on an instrument like the French horn you’re more limited and you really have to choose something musically brilliant. On violin, you’re not forced to, so it’s a matter of aesthetic discipline; there’s a lot of self-editing.

“But also, honestly, I come from a different background from real classical players, so I just can’t do a lot of that stuff,” she adds, laughing. “But maybe it’s because I never wanted to, so I never practiced it. And anyway, I often don’t do things that I can do because I don’t want to hear them.”

It would be understating the story to describe Scheinman’s background as merely different. Born and raised in a rural setting near the Pacific Ocean and 250 miles north of San Francisco, she was the daughter of musical parents whose commitment to living simply made it a daring leap forward to eventually allow electricity in their house. The community around them shared these values, finding stimulus in each other’s company rather than through suburban or technological distractions. Scheinman’s father mobilized its more creative souls into musical productions three or four times each year, in which anybody who could play anything was somehow written into the show, with everyone else savoring the results from the audience.

“There was an 80-year-old trombone player,” Scheinman remembers. “He was deaf, so he’d read my dad’s charts and we’d play along with him. There was a boogie-woogie piano player who had run away from a criminal life and ended up out in the boonies because there were no cops. And there was me, at seven years old, playing violin and piano and singing.”

Those instruments claimed equal time during Scheinman’s early years. She began on piano at age four or five and added violin at seven. Eventually she took lessons on both in Arcata, California, which involved a two-hour drive each way along winding rural roads. (“My memories of that trip are filled with barfing on the way in and again on the way back,” she says.) Despite the rigors of the road, Scheinman progressed especially rapidly on piano, on which she had the benefit of continuous study with a gifted teacher, Frank Merck, whereas on violin she had to adapt to a changing sequence of instructors.

Still, after completing a year at Humboldt State University and then enrolling at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Scheinman decided to commit herself to violin. “I was quite good on piano,” she explains. “But when I got to Oberlin, it began to feel like a more isolating instrument. I associated it with playing solo concerts, which I absolutely loved to do. But I associated my off time and my fun time more with the violin, because it was portable. When I had it with me, it would help me start conversations and fit into things.”

After a final semester of piano study, Scheinman decided to leave Oberlin and return to Northern California. While earning a degree in English lit from the University of California at Berkeley, she found time to perform Gypsy jazz with the Hot Club of San Francisco, as well as more experimental music with the Rova Saxophone Quartet and other adventurous artists, artful punk rock with the band Charming Hostess, and music that defied classification with other ensembles, including several that she founded and led.

Her trajectory accelerated when she moved to New York in 1999. Like oddly cut pieces of a puzzle, she assembled her music from gigs that included a stint with the Big Apple Circus band, playing Balkan folk tunes, teaching at a tap-dance school, and busking for tips in subways. Guest appearances onstage and in the studio set the stage for her studio debut with The Rabbi’s Lover in 2002. She established a home base at Barbès in Brooklyn, where regular listeners could witness her ongoing assimilation of input and inspiration from a dozen different sources—it is impossible, actually, to think of a Western genre that has not informed and enriched her artistry.

One recent source of inspiration comes from her acquisition of a new instrument. For ten years, Scheinman has been more than satisfied with a Maurizio Tadioli that she had purchased from Joan Balter Violins in Berkeley, California. But then, not long ago, Balter gave her a violin by master maker Roger Hargrave—modeled after Yehudi Menuhin’s 1742 Guarneri del Gesù known as the “Lord Wilton”—to try out. She loved it from the start, but decided it was beyond her price range. So she brought it to Nashville in June, to use on some sessions with Bill Frisell, and then asked producer Lee Townsend to return it to Balter, whose shop is about a block away from his office.

“And, basically, he refused,” she says. “Everybody in the band fell in love with it and insisted I had to get it. That’s not the whole reason, but it was an influence on my decision. It’s a beautiful instrument, really rich and dark. It is such a player, especially for improvisers; it sort of plays you. It can get very quiet and very loud. And it’s even more expressive and subtle than what I’d been playing before.”

Those extremes of dynamic serve Scheinman well on those solos, some of them almost whispered across the strings on Crossing the Field. On the other hand, the vocal album—as well as her recent arrangement work with Lucinda Williams, Bono of U2, and other artists—charts her growing interest in composition and arrangement.

“I do like arranging and composing,” she says. “And that does affect how I play. When it comes to immortalizing something on a record, so far I’ve been more compositional about it. Really, I need both sides in my life. If I don’t get to have those live experiences, just letting go and playing, I’m not a happy person.”