One Violin, No Walls
Jenkins alone with a violin, inventing the rules as he goes.
Solo Concert, recorded in January 1977 at Washington Square Church in New York City and released by India Navigation later that year, is a live document of Leroy Jenkins working entirely by himself. There is no rhythm section to lean on and no harmonic floor beneath him, just a violin, a bow, and the room. The record is dedicated to Bruce Hayden, a teacher and friend, which gives the session a quiet, personal frame.
What you hear is a violinist pushing the instrument well past its usual vocabulary. Jenkins bows with aggression, scrapes, sustains drones, and jumps between pizzicato figures and long, bent lines, often within the space of a few seconds. Because he is alone, every shift in texture has to carry the momentum, and he handles that with a confidence that makes the stretches of sheer noise feel purposeful rather than random. AllMusic reviewer Ron Wynn put it well, calling this about as adventurous and experimental as violin playing gets, while noting that Jenkins always knows when to come back in and how.
Where this sits in his career matters. Jenkins was already a central figure in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and Solo Concert is one of the purest statements of the ideas he was developing there. If you want his most accessible entry point, start elsewhere, but if you want to hear how far one person can take the violin in front of an audience with no safety net, this is the place to begin.
