Vancouver International Jazz Festival artist-in-residence Wendy Eisenberg got in touch with her 13-year-old self to craft self-titled album
The singer and guitarist makes music that veers from lushly orchestrated American to wildly experimental free-jazz improv
Wendy Eisenberg. Photo by Eleanor Petry
As part of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Coastal Jazz presents Wendy Eisenberg Viewfinder at the Revue Stage on July 3 at 9 pm. Eisenberg will also perform a solo set and as part of a duo with Lisa Cay Miller at Zameen Art House on July 2 at 2:30 pm
MANY MUSICIANS AND BANDS make their recorded debuts with a self-titled release. It’s a logical choice, since a first album is like an introduction—and it’s an easy solution to the conundrum of thinking up a title.
But when someone with a discography that’s several albums deep releases a self-titled LP, it seems to signal something more profound—such as a reinvention or a renewed sense of purpose.
When singer and guitarist Wendy Eisenberg calls Stir from the home in Brooklyn she shares with her partner and frequent musical collaborator Mari Rubio, she offers an explanation for giving her eighth solo album, released earlier this year, the title Wendy Eisenberg.
“I think in part it was genuinely a statement of intent and resolution, but also the writing of this one was simultaneous with a personal, private process of understanding who I was when I was really little, and the kind of songs that I wanted to write when I was a younger person,” she says. “Making it self-titled was a multifaceted and kind of intense decision that I didn’t take very lightly. I wanted to honour the writer that I wanted to be when I was really getting into music for the first time, and it’s kind of dedicated to her.”
The album finds Eisenberg in full singer-songwriter mode, her gently unfolding vocal melodies and intricate, virtuosic guitar accompaniment backed by arrangements that lean alternately toward folk and Baroque pop. In many ways, Wendy Eisenberg is worlds away from the artist’s 2024 record, Viewfinder, a more formally experimental song cycle that drew on Eisenberg’s disparate influences—from jazz to Americana—and infused them with fearlessly free improvisation and dissonance.
Wendy Eisenberg is both more sonically restrained and more emotionally affecting, as Eisenberg reflects on a period of her life that saw her reconciling her past conception of herself with a newfound embracing of her queerness. (A note on pronouns: Per a 2023 tweet, Eisenberg, who identifies as nonbinary, is comfortable with any and all, including they/them and he/him; for the purposes of this article, we’re using she/her.)
“It’s not as though the records that I made before this were the records of a student, even though I always will be,” she says. “It’s more that this record feels like I’ve kind of landed on a mode of expression, at least in the arena of solo songwriting, that is closer to what I’d wanted in the beginning, which is using more conventional materials, like harmony and acoustic guitar—the things that you really start off loving, at least in my suburban scene growing up—and thinking, ‘How do I make them accessible both to the inner reaches of my heart, and something that a 13-year-old might like?’”
Wendy Eisenberg’s new self-titled album.
In other words, this is an album that attempts to finally fulfill the musical ambitions of a 13-year-old under the influence of Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, and the Beach Boys.
“It just feels like it’s answering her question, rather than the question of a 20-something searching and driving around on tour, which is like a lot of the records from that period, or a free-jazz experimentalist, which is like Viewfinder and a lot of other records,” Eisenberg says. “This is more like, ‘Hey, everything I learned was in order to try to make your vision possible, and this record’s like the first step into that.’”
It’s not as if Eisenberg is leaving the bold adventurism of Viewfinder behind, mind you. In fact, that record is the focus of a concert she’ll play at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, backed by an all-star band handpicked by the fest’s co–artistic director, Cole Schmidt.
Eisenberg recorded Viewfinder at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 with a lineup that included fellow New Yorkers Tyrone Allen II, Zekereyya el-Magharbel, Andrew Links, Carmen Q. Rothwell, Booker Stardrum, and Chris Williams. In Vancouver, she’ll be joined by locals Dan Gaucher (drums and electronics), JP Carter (trumpet and electronics), and Nebyu Yohannes (trombone), along with former Vancouverites Sean Cronin (bass) and Cat Toren (piano).
“I haven’t played that music in a while because it was written for those specific musicians,” Eisenberg says. “So when Cole asked me about playing and being in residence at the festival, he mentioned having some local players step in, and I was just so excited to play that music again. We’re going to play most of the stuff from it, but obviously that’s a double LP, and we don’t really have that time; we’re not going to play for 80 minutes.”
When she speaks to Stir, Eisenberg has yet to rehearse with this new crew, but listening to their recorded works has her keenly looking forward to sharing the stage with a band possessed of peerless improvisational chops.
“I’m a pretty loose scorer, and also one of the secrets of that record—and also just my solo practice in general—is that I usually try and hold down the guitar part as this complicated thing that I’m dealing with, and everybody is usually just free to do whatever they’re hearing over it,” she reveals. “That’s the compositional thing that I like as a songwriter—and as a jazz composer, whatever that means in my case.”
The Vancouver audience won’t necessarily see her blazing through off-the-cuff guitar solos; Eisenberg says her playing is deeply improvisational at a structural level. She describes the parts she writes as “melty”, noting that the material takes its own shape as it’s being performed.
“There’s so much freedom in the compositional, knotty guitar-playing that I’m writing,” Eisenberg says. “I know these songs pretty well at this point. They’re quite old, to me, which is weird because they’re only a couple years old in terms of being out as a release, but I’ve been playing this music since 2022—or ’21, really.
“The more you know a song, the more it doesn’t feel like you’re improvising it, or that you even composed it,” the guitarist continues. “It just feels like it’s occurring to you, because it’s kind of in your biology. And that’s a different experience for me than for the rest of the ensemble that's going to be at the festival with me, so it’s really going to be cool to see how we negotiate this mutual facility, you know what I mean?” 
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