Tues.-Tues., July 13-24 Violinist Jenny Scheinman met John Zorn while ...

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Tues.-Tues., July 13-24

Violinist Jenny Scheinman met John Zorn while browsing through the bins at Amoeba Records in Oakland. He ended up inviting her to play with him, and this year his label Tzadik released her album, Shalagaster. Sounds wild when she tells me about it, but I quickly realize that those kinds of random, inspired meetings with musicians pretty much follow her wherever she goes, pushing and pulling her in all sorts of directions.

She'll be giving us a sampling of the various corners of her artistic mind over the next couple of months during a series of Tuesday-night performances at Barbès in Park Slope.

This coming Tuesday Scheinman will get things started with a bunch of pieces written after an intense two-year period of touring and recording with artists like Bill Frisell. It's music that she characterizes as "written in the spring to cool the hot summer head?a little like the folk/parlor/chamber music of some little Mexican cantina in 1920." On stage to help her out will be Doug Wieselman (clarinet), Rob Burger (accordion and piano), Greg Cohen (bass), and a drummer yet to be recruited.

If you like what you hear (or are a Manhattanite disinclined to travel to the outer boroughs), you might also want to pencil in her CD-release bash at Joe's Pub on July 24. Things will get a little jazzier for this gig and find her sharing the stage with Myra Melford, Russ Johnson, Trevor Dunn and Kenny Wollesen, musicians she calls her "very favorites [who] are very rarely all in town at the same moment."

At this point she says the rest of her Barbès dates are "formally unformed," reflecting her intention to keep things casual in the little back room, but we can expect fellow club regular Matt Munisteri to drop by as well as guitarist Adam Levy and bassist Lee Alexander (old friends stolen away by Norah Jones, no hard feelings). There'll be a little calypso, a little Reinhardt, a few cowboy ballads, whatever seems to suit.

Scheinman will open her Barbès residency fresh off some R&R with her folks out on the West Coast. The trip gave her the chance to play some fiddle with her guitar-playing dad and celebrate her best friend's birthday far from the noise of city streets. "The six of us did lemon drops and played poker," she recounts, "then went skinny dipping and got Mike's truck stuck out on the river bar and had to walk home barefoot under a half moon. They all asked about New York and how it was living in the big city, and I could barely remember it."

Barbès, 376 9th St. (6th Ave.), Park Slope, 718-965-9177, call for time & price; Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778, 9, $15.