Portal by Terry Jenoure

PORTAL is in three parts.

PART 1 - BREATHE (tracks 1-9)
Terry Jenoure, violin
Avery Sharpe, bass
Wayne Smith, cello

PART 2: SHELTER (tracks 10-18
Terry Jenoure, violin/voice
Angelica Sanchez, piano

PART 3: FLAME (tracks 19-27)
Terry Jenoure, violin/voice
Joe Fonda, bass/flute
Reggie Nicholson, drums


Portal consists of three recordings performed live by three different ensembles. The first trio Breathe, features Wayne Smith (cello) and Avery Sharpe (bass). The second, Shelter, is a duo featuring Angelica Sanchez (piano). The third ensemble is a trio, Flame, with Joe Fonda (bass) and Reggie Nicholson (drums).

"This project began as a way for me to describe, through sound, my experience with stages of prayer. At first, the heart quiets itself, then it names what needs healing, and finally it releases its potent Love, the ultimate force of change. But, recorded in September 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, and as massive suffering due to factors such as extreme climate and the continued oppression of many communities came into widespread focus, both the meaning and significance of this work was magnified for me. A portal, whether metaphysical or political, is a huge passageway that leads us into new territory. These recordings symbolize phases of that journey. Together, the three ensembles release a sonic call for needed change in our hearts and social conditions.

Recorded live, all compositions are a combination of graphic notation, verbal instructions, and unstructured collaborations."
Terry Jenoure


LINER NOTES
Early on there’s a bosom. And a cradle. And a cauldron. And wavelengths of irrefutable hankering. And emanations of gnawing portent. Soon after that there’s a primordial trolly transfer to the long windward leg, out toward points beyond. There’s a portal through which you’ve been beckoned, the parallel you, the you who’s summoned solely by these otherwise unaccountable paroxysms of wonder. The premier of “Portal” startlingly punched my ticket for precisely such a sensory excursion. Like the illustrative fine-art triptychs of Bosch, Monet and Bacon, or even functional utilities like AAA Trip Tiks, her tripartite, sequential, aural mise en scène gives probing ideation and narrative hue to a tale of, in these instances, nothing less than human transcendence. Opus Jenoure!

Recorded at the Institute for the Musical Arts, she and fellow sojourners comprised three distinct units broadcast for Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares via Amherst Media over three separate dates, delineating the three movements of “Portal”—“Breathe,” “Shelter” and “Flame.” They would, in toto, come to embody an innate human condition: the magnetic calling that compels us to expand, not settle; that tests our spiritual mettle against the unknown.

“Breathe,” as mapped in her poetic introduction, found Jenoure, cellist Wayne Smith and bassist
Avery Sharpe—a stringy quorum of interwoven apprehension—“preparing” for their exploratory venture. Foregoing familiar “sacred space” and “cherished tiny miracles,” they bowed, plucked and strummed their way across a textured, inquisitive yet destined trail. They sawed away emotional inertia and instead embroidered a determined, rousing cohesiveness. Unison string massage—mellifluous tones, siren lures, lush hymnals—created meadows of soulful turf. So too did their metronomic striking and surging suggest demonstrative trailblazing, trio-forward free fall, and, excuse me Mr. Monk, rhythm-a-ning. The soloists’ imaginative dexterity—Sharpe’s redoubtable, pluckticulate, stentorian gravitas; Smith’s cinematic scoring; her own dervish-like skidding—was incorporated into Jenoure’s grand design. As if portaging a wistful notion between a safe haven and a new, still to be determined, expansive cathedral, they pieced together a quilt of stirring odes and lantern-lit consciousness—their precious cargo—and began to expect the unexpected.

Second night. On the move now. “Shelter” paired Jenoure with pianist Angelica Sanchez in a melded profusion of vocalese and instrument-ese. The narrative advanced warily, alertly, “Don’t stop there, beware!” into adventurous territory. “I see you climbing…I can’t tell what it is.” Their enlightened camaraderie pulsed with both fragility and frenzy, what, in Ellingtonian realms might have been diminuendos and crescendos in transit. As they wended through thematic checkpoints and waystations, every passage at every moment seemed to extrude the essence of consideration and assessment. Jenoure reflexively framed the fight, flight or favor impulse by stroking with eerie skittishness, classical virtuosity and abstract real-time adaptability. And her interspersed songlets—breathy to scatty, operatic to Odetta-ic—spanned the breadth of this enterprise. “Look at yourself through this lens.” “The sky is clear.” Sanchez, equally possessed, built moving scenarios—vortexes where dimension was achieved by the ratio of her colliding stepping stones comping, to her asymmetric long-line runs that smoldered like bellows of promise. Together, their campaign—jaunty kinship infused with kinetic charisma—expressed the primal, teetering, hop-scotching instability of, yet inexorability of, our universally embedded endeavor. “Look at yourself. Now, look around you!”

Now, on this last night, travails behind, come, be near the “Flame.” Jenoure was joined by bassist Joe Fonda and drummer Reggie Nicholson. Her introductory recitation unfurled a poignant welcoming mat: “The other side. The healing side. The free side. The light of the flame reminds us to move fearlessly. Sit beside the flame and know that the same heat shooting out from the fire is also stored within our bones. The light from that flame shows us to have wisdom and confidence and a strange clairvoyance, it shows us to be divine.” Given the initial prevalence of flaring, frenetic violin and bass bowing, and short, fractured drumming, the healing seemed to come from within a deep furnace. Always pliant, circling and settling, bass and drums now thickened. What followed their recuperation by the flame was a stimulating, focused, cohesion.

And then, on an emotional ascent, these new arrivals went beyond healing, to revitalization. Fonda literally tickled his strings and Jenoure’s bow bounced off of hers. She chanted in a dialect most easily characterized as soul-summoning emoteese: climactic, monosyllabic incantations with feathery, whispery Mahalia-like fiber. The gospels according to Terry. Wiry, streaky and spiraling, she was pure violin vitality on the wing. Nicholson burst forth in full-kit blossom, replete with rattles, while Fonda played flute, aspiring to an astral plane. The bass man then began hand-beating his resting instrument just as Jenoure was then clacking wood blocks and scatting. This became the “other side” festival—ceremonies of the reveling arts. The attendees experienced the metamorphosis from venturers to grail-finders. When the trio broke into actual
unison jazz, it was as if the very act of re-entry itself indicated that a formerly gauzy transcendental phase had just encountered real time, real life—and continued to flourish.

Flush with that spirit of attainment, there were whirls of raging pizzicato, rollicking mallets, splashing cymbals, an autoharp! Jenoure’s sinewy phrases; her self-slapped chest; droning, chiming gongs; drum rims; shells; all contributed to a saturated collage of exquisitely particular tone, and an enduring array of sparkle and satiated wonder.

Chockablock as it was, leg by leg, with irresistible listening lean-tos, Jenoure’s “Portal” never veered from her pole star commitment to inquiry. Her vignettes provided profound sustenance over multiple nights and kindled in me a commensurate appetite for her future compass

Joe Major
Concert Review, September 25, 26, 27, 2020

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"By the time Priscilla dramaturged Terry Jenoure’s theater pieces, Lydia On the Top Floor in 2006 and My Bronx in 2013, the three of us had been friends for quite a while. Glenn met Terry in the mid-1990s when both worked for the UMass Fine Arts Center. In 2009, Glenn produced Three Things to Say, a tribute to Terry’s mentor Leroy Jenkins, featuring fellow violinists Billy Bang and Charles Burnham. In 2018 we produced Terry Jenoure & Bejewelled, with Sibylle Pomorin, Jin Hi Kim, Angelica Sanchez and Maria Mitchell, for Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, our shareholder-based non-profit that supplies western Massachusetts with a steady stream of world-class improvisers. Our collaborative journey now brings us to Portal, the three-part epic that launched the ninth season of Jazz Shares. Throughout it all, we have marveled at Terry’s endless creativity and her thirst for the next artistic challenge. To say we have been inspired by her example is an understatement. To say we have been enriched by having her as a dear friend is an even bigger understatement."

Priscilla Maria Page & Glenn Siegel
Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares

Terry Jenoure violinist & vocalist is a pioneer in the field of creative music. She uses traditional notation, poly-dimensional graphics, and poetry to guide compositions. Terry holds Master's and Doctoral degrees in Education, and has been granted awards from Creative Capital; MAP Fund, South Arts Jazz Road; New England Foundation for the Arts; & National Endowment for the Arts.