Jane Ira Bloom
Web Site
November 2001

"...being in an environment of supportiveness and understanding is tremendously helpful to any artist wherever that might be—your home, your present home or past home. You can enrich yourself by surrounding yourself with people who are deep into something else, as intensely as you are into what you’re doing... "

Sometimes The Magic
Arabesque
2001

Reviewed By
Jim Santella

The Red Quartets
Arabesque
1999

Reviewed By
Glenn Astarita
Mike Neely

Photo Credit
Jack Vartoogian

By Sandy Langer

SLL: How did you find out about jazz growing up?

JIB: To be honest with you, the first sounds were really records. I grew up in the suburbs and there were no jazz clubs out there. But I was near Boston so I have some early high school memories of my brother taking me downtown to the Jazz Workshop - next to that was Paul’s Mall in the late 1960s. I remember hearing Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins there. Those were my pivotal live jazz music experiences. Boston was a great jazz education town. I had access to some marvelous teachers there when I was very young because all the conservatories were around. I count Joe Viola as one of them and Frank Batistti as well (he was head of the education department at New England Conservatory and head woodwind ensemble conductor and he was a very important influence on me). I was in his woodwind ensemble for many years and learned a great deal from him. So when I think back I really wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, I was in a major urban area where I had access to great music teachers.

SLL: Well Boston isn’t exactly a place you associate with Jazz. It’s more of a town where you think of classical music being performed, pretty conservative.

JIB: Yes, well I think I even felt that as a kid because after high school I left and went to Yale. I was in New Haven and even moving from Boston to New Haven I could feel the difference in the cities. New Haven was really the place where I got my formative playing experiences from 1972 to 1977. That was the music community that I really grew up in.

SLL: That’s very interesting. Is that a lively jazz scene in New Haven?

JIB: It was in the mid seventies. I mean a lot has been written about it—it’s kind of funny when you’ve been there, but it just happened that there were a lot of very creative musicians who later went on to very illustrious careers that all happened to be in New Haven at the same time. And what that did was create an exciting artistic environment. There were lots of independent concerts going on – people were making records on their own record labels. There was a lot of creative music happening there and it just created this atmosphere that made you want to do things.

SLL: It sounds very exciting. So you earned a masters in Sax in 1977 there. Did you get any visual arts exposure while you were there?

JIB: Very much so. I spent a lot of time in the Yale art gallery. I guess I count my academic studies at Yale as an important influence on me as a musical thinker because I was exposed to all kinds of artistic expression. Whether it was visual art or film, dance, theater—these were all things I studied and thought about. So Yale really was an important place for me when I think about it.

SLL: Yes it sounds like a good, broad education for a musical thinker. Generally you think of people in music as being more narrowly focused on composition, playing and so on. Lots has been written about you and your eclecticism.

JIB: (laughing) I’ve always thought of myself as being more interested in ideas. I’ve always been very comfortable allowing things that I think about in all kinds of areas to come together with the music so it makes sense.

SLL: Did anyone in your family have a musical background or encourage your like for music

JIB: My parents were very supportive. They weren’t professional musicians but my mother played piano when I was very young and I’m sure that stimulated me. I was four when I started piano lessons but I guess it was really their record collection that was sitting around the house that did it. I mean it was those first sounds that I heard on the piano and on records. Those were the primal sounds that I heard.

SLL: Why jazz? And why this particular instrument?

JIB: You know a lot of people have asked me that question. When I was young, when I began studying sax, I mean I was nine... Well to be honest my earliest memories were—shiny—it looked great in the case. And I think I was also the kind of kid that was interested in being different. I got interested in the instrument, had good teachers and then found my way to Joe Viola who was this master teacher. You know when you’re in the ninth grade you play with your friends, you play in the school orchestra, the band, practice and go to lessons—that’s the level that you’re at when you begin. It’s interesting, I couldn’t imagine anything else but yet you wonder why?

SLL: Did you have any problems because you were a woman while you were at Yale? When you first began performing, you know like “she’s a woman, how good can she be.”

JIB: Interestingly enough I cite that time at Yale in New Haven as one of the most encouraging, supportive periods of any time in my career because there was a very interesting music community there and somehow what ever it was that created that climate made me feel instantly accepted.

SLL: Was that the seventies or the eighties?

JIB: That was the mid-seventies.

SLL: So that would have been at the time of the beginnings of the movement for women’s liberation.

JIB: You’re right, women’s consciousness and women’s jazz festivals were very much in the air. But I came very well supported from where I came from and I always felt like I had the opportunities that I wanted and was playing with interesting musicians and that discrimination wasn’t a factor in that environment.

SLL: So you were fortunate in that way because there have been other stories of women in the arts who haven’t felt this way. So what was your first live performance like a professional gig?

JIB: I can remember it – bassist Kent McLagan and I played our first paying gig at the Yale cabaret. And one interesting note - we were playing original music—improvised jazz of our own making—our own compositions that we’d been working on that year. What an extraordinary start when you think about it. We did play some standards but when you think about it--it was a very different kind of beginning.

SLL: You’ve been performing for over three decades now. What changes have you seen in the world of jazz since you started?

JIB: Gee, that’s a big question. I have to think about it. Just the numbers have changed. When I began my career, (came to New York City in 1977) basically I had my own record and my own independent record label which was distributed by an organization called the New Music Distribution Service. NMDS was a distribution service for independents like myself – people who didn’t have record contracts but had something to say and had their own LPs-no such thing as CDs then. And by getting my record to NMDS my music reached all the major jazz critics -like Nat Hentoff. So when I came to New York I already had an entrée. Today, if you’re a young musician and lets say you’ve made your own CD (which is now much easier than making an LP back then), you’d be confronted with some serious competition. Just the sheer numbers of young musicians who are out there trying to do just what you are doing. It’s a different environment just in terms of the amount of people. I guess along with its growth the music has also gotten corporatized. You know there are good and bad aspects to that but when I began it wasn’t like that—

SLL: The emphasis on money do you think that and everything we’ve been talking about influences younger artists in how they think about getting their music out and what kind of music they do?

JIB: I think it has had an effect. Although in the history of the music business there have always been those musicians who do what they hear and that’s what they do no matter what. But if you just think about the technology for example to make an LP, not only was it extremely expensive back then but it was cumbersome as well. You could only do it in a particular place and you had to have the proper equipment and then you had to learn how to get to a pressing plant. It was a very complicated and expensive proposition and because it was harder to do, the idea of making a record or a musical document of your work had more musical focus. The recorded event had more importance because it was harder to do and expensive and you had just so much time to say it -remember when 40 minutes was the norm. I think it really focused creative energy in a different way. It heightened the level of the creative material that you presented because you didn’t get many chances. When something is hard to do, you want to do the absolutely best work that you possibly can. It changes your whole concept about what it means to make a musical document.

SLL: How has your music changed much over the years?

JIB: Well, in retrospect—it seems that things that were very intuitive to begin with in my playing, found ways to transform and solidify into...—I’m groping for words. When I first began playing I used to move a lot when I played. I never thought about it, never gave it a second thought-it was just intuitive and natural to me. And then people began to tell me, “oh, you move a lot when you play.” And then when I came to the city I got in contact and worked with improvisational dancers who said “Wow! Isn’t that interesting.” and I became more interested and aware of how sound changes when it moves. So little by little I developed more awareness of ideas that were originally intuitive and began outlining them in more formal ways in my music. I guess you could say I’m making them a more conscious part of my musical vocabulary and then developing them not only for myself but for other instruments through orchestration. It’s a way of extending your musical ideas passed yourself.

SLL: That’s interesting. I’ve been reading about your using a velocity machine or some such. I mean music to paraphrase Claus Oldenburg on art—doesn’t just sit on its ass in a museum. It does something—it makes something happen.

JIB: Essentially, when I play I’ve developed a kind of signature sound that’s involved with swinging the bell of the soprano abruptly passed several microphones creating this panning effect –sometimes when you get it just right it feels like a Doppler effect and I’ve used electronics to enhance this idea. But basically it’s the sound of a saxophone. I’ve taken this signature movement and tried to notate it for other instruments - involve other brass instruments in moving and playing at the same time. So from that came the idea to orchestrate. A piece that I did several years ago for example for The American Composers Orchestra where whole brass sections of trumpets, trombones, and French horns stand in unison and turn the bells of their horns 180 and 360 degrees in unison at different velocities. It takes practice—it’s not something you do at home. We had the help of a choreographer. It’s very gratifying to see an idea integrated into an ensemble and become a sound that is much larger than a soprano saxophone. That’s a good example of what I’m trying to do with sounds. I even set the brass section up in the third balcony in Carnegie Hall (you know where that is!—it’s high and it’s straight down) and the audience experienced a sound surround sound not only coming from different sides of the concert hall but literally moving as the musicians moved the bells of their horns. So it became a very “moving” listening experience. I was on stage so I didn’t get the best listen but people told me it was pretty exciting.

SLL: Are you surprised by your success given what a small audience it has in the states? Do you think it’s unusual for a woman instrumentalist to succeed as a jazz musician?

JIB: I’m happy to be playing the music—look at what I’m doing –I’m playing music that I conceive and I get an opportunity to perform it and to compose things that are interesting to me.

SLL: And, you’re teaching too.

JIB: Yeah, all these things - you don’t take this for granted, especially in this country where jazz has such a small but dedicated audience. There seem to be larger audiences in Europe these days.

SLL: How do you feel about criticism of your music as too abstract?

JIB: I certainly understand how people might say that—when I talk to people about my work it’s all relative, you know—I think of myself as a person whose interested in going from places I know to places I don’t know. So I think of myself as very traditionally aware - I think many artists will tell you that—that abstract thought or fresh ideas don’t come out of the air, they’re grounded in a lot of knowledge about what has come before. And what you choose to say wouldn’t be the same if that connection to a music tradition weren’t there. So it always surprises me to hear that. I understand it but yet from my own point of view – gee that’s not the way I think about music when I’m working. Abstract thinking makes perfect sense to me. I just never work or proceed from a negative point of view—it’s always a positive impulse that draws an artist to an idea. I think that’s why a question like that is always so confusing.

SLL: Who are your favorite musicians, artists.

JIB: Laughing—there are so many, so many. I know that for me there is a very strong connection to vocalists. Interesting for somebody who doesn’t sing but yet I’ve always felt very strong connection to strong women’s voices—everything from Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald to Abbey Lincoln-these are sounds that truly move me. On the instrumental side I’ve always loved trumpet and I love the quality of the struggle that’s inside playing a trumpet even though I don’t play the instrument. Miles Davis and Booker Little’s sounds grab my ear-those were the sounds I gravitated to. If you are thinking compositionally or aesthetically it’s endless. I mean in my head I give equal weight to Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Ornette Coleman, and Andrew Hill. They are really important composers who have been very instrumental in my thinking about melodic line and group sound and they just come to mind at this moment. In another moment many, many other people would come to mind.

SLL: Do you think living in Manhattan has had an influence on how you see the world and compose music?

JIB: Absolutely, New York is my home—it’s something about that indefinable quality, about the metabolism of the city—yeah, when you talk about energy, definitely. When you talk about musicians and how they make sounds, you think of the metabolism that they approach their music with - I think that’s the word I would use to describe the feeling. It’s what makes what happens here unique in the world. There’s something about the urban cultural experience that is very different from the rural experience and it affects who you are and of course it would affect your music.

SLL: What drew you to New York City rather than going to Europe or some other place?

JIB: There was no choice, if you were a musician and you wanted to have a future as a jazz musician there was only one place to come to and that’s New York City. Very fortunately I wasn’t far, but mentally and emotionally I was very far so it was a very big adjustment to come here and find my way through this—you know that old saying, New York , New York, the city so nice they had to name it twice—if you can make it there you can make it anywhere—People that I respected in the jazz world all said “you gotta come to New York, that’s where you gotta get your experience.”

SLL: Do you think its hard being a woman doing what you do or is it a non-issue for you in terms of getting gigs, recording venues etc.

JIB: It’s a good question. The first part first—Yeah absolutely there’s been issues in my career - haven’t gone in certain directions because of it or haven’t progressed at the same tempo that I might have. I wouldn’t have been able to say that to you when I began my career but I can say it to you now. Of course it was so much different then at the beginning of the woman’s movement. And now by the time we get to the year 2001 things have changed. But the fact that I still hear stories from young women musicians that I remember hearing twenty-five years ago is upsetting. It means we really haven’t dealt with the issue up front—the sexism. On the other hand, - and I don’t think I would have been able to say this to you when I began my career - is that absolutely there is something extraordinary about being a woman playing this music that makes me really proud. When you think of what Billie Holiday had and how many great instrumentalists wanted to sound like her – she inspired all the great ones - well she had something that they didn’t have. (We both laugh)—It’s interesting-now I’ve been around a bit. There were actually quiet a few women’s jazz festivals in the late 70s’ like Cobi Narita’s work, and women consciousness was very much in the air. And then a period of time went by when there wasn’t so much attention in that direction. It seemed that people had become complacent about sexism and Billy Taylor was one of the people who saw the need to change that. Things hadn’t changed as much as we had hoped and so he organized the Mary Lou Williams Festival at the Kennedy Center to help showcase women jazz artists. Billy Taylor, much to his credit saw that something wasn’t right and did something about it. So he’s really done a wonderful thing bringing focus to these very fine musicians.

SLL: How does your teaching influence your music?

JIB: Well, I’ve just been at it a little while. I’ve just finished my third year teaching at the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music and I think the most positive thing about it has been being in contact with young people. You know as you go on in your career, of course there are your colleagues that you work with, but you realize how tremendously important it is to feel the energy of what somebody new on the scene is thinking and feeling. You want to encourage them the same way other musicians did for you, to find their own way through the music world and to make their music a product of their own experience just as each generation has done. The constant of jazz is that it changes. Contrary to what other concert series in this town might have you believe, it’s about constant change and it’s about change that sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable because it’s new. This has always been the job of the artist. And when people ask me what the future of jazz is I dearly hope that I don’t know, because if something has gone right then there’s a young person that I’ve been talking to who is going to completely surprise my ears about what the next move is gonna be. I’m not gonna know—they are. And then I’ll know that the music is doing its thing.

SLL: A lot has been made of the gestural aspects of your music and the fact that you are always pushing the envelope – Can you give us some insights into your recent commission for Chamber Music America ? It supposed to be based on Jackson Pollock–how do you see that relationship?

JIB: Well I’ve always been a visual thinker—when I look at paintings, when I play, I feel something sculptural, visual, cinematic—I don’t know what it is but it’s there. And, for me Jackson Pollock was a natural attraction. So many jazz artists have found a kinship with his art because it involved so much raw spontaneity - from my point of view not only spontaneity but actual physical movement expressed in the actual end product of his paint. And the linearity of ideas were things that just made sense for a composer or thinker or a player like myself – the action paintings move me deeply and when I see them, I hear them. I’ve seen the documentaries and the exhibit about his work. He’s a fascinating man and his work is fascinating to me. The commission was an idea that I came up with, something that interested me - to write a suite of compositions about his paintings – different ones - specific ones that I spent a lot of time sitting with in the Museum of Modern Art and other ones just imagining. I guess you could say that one of the characteristics of the music is that I think of throwing sound around the band like paint. That’s really what I’m imagining.

SLL: So you’re really in a dialogue with Pollock in an imaginative kind of a way?

JIB: And, with the other musicians. My music, unlike Pollock’s work, is scored for a quartet-there’s four of us painting. The characteristics of the musicians that I play with all add to the color, tone and emotional tenor of the pieces. These are all very subtle things but could be likened to paint. I’m thinking in a Duke Ellingtonesque way—I’m thinking of the characteristics of the people I play with –the timbre of their instruments, their particular style perhaps being synonymous with the hue or color or contact of a paint, or thickness or thinness of a line. Their voice is a kind of a pallet for me. Exactly.

SLL: How has the new technology affected your music?

JIB: Incredibly. Although when I think of the electronics that I use, they’re actually considered retro-but just the fact that electronic sound interests me and is part of my music. I use something that is rather old-fashioned called effects processing. I use some boxes that augment the sound of the saxophone with other electronic sounds so that it becomes a blend. They are analogue boxes as opposed to digital so in a sense that’s retro. But the idea that as an artist I’m reacting and responding to my own time. These are the tools and sounds of my generation that interest me so I feel absolutely comfortable using them and trying to improvise with them.

SLL: What’s difference has computer technology made?

JIB: The big difference is that you have music from all over the world at the push of a button on a computer. It’s made the music world much, much smaller. I can remember when I wanted to hear world music or the sound of a Balinese gamelan. I had to go to the library and see if I could find the lp (if I was lucky) on the Nonesuch World Music Explorer series and take that home. And then maybe I’d make a seven inch reel to reel tape of that and I could have it for my own. So having access to sounds from all over the world is so much easier now and contributes to making young musicians’ ears more eclectic.

SLL: And their minds as well

JIB: and their minds absolutely.

SLL: What you think about sound and what you can put together and what you can’t and how you can do that and all of that

JIB: Right, and if you can’t hear improvised music live, there’s so much you can hear now in terms of recorded performance on the net or you know just audio.

SLL: and you can make your own. You have talked about teaching music by ear, at least what I’ve read in other interviews. Now given what you’ve said about the new educated ear, how do you do that—how do you think about that when you are teaching students

JIB: Well I was speaking specifically of my experience at The New School (New York City), of trying to work with young jazz musicians in a way that gets more to their intuitive musical selves first before it gets to their eyes. A lot of musicians are so highly trained from a conservatory point of view in terms of sight reading and reading changes that you can gloss over a different kind of musical experience that happens when you learn music in a different way. I call it learning not through your eyes but through your gut, which is by ear. In the old days you’d learn music by grabbing it off a record or learning instantly on a bandstand next to another musician. So in a sense I’ve been trying to bring an aspect of that to a classroom.

SLL: so you’re really, in a sense trying to do a reverse of this technical whatever so there’s some kind of balance that you’re trying to get between a feeling and this sheer technology which is overwhelming because of the emphasis on the academic perfectionism makes it, I think a little difficult—I wonder how you feel about the perfectionism in the recording studios and all the rest on, tape, digital and all the rest of the technology and what you actually hear in a live concert or concert hall?

JIB: You raise a very good point because people may not be aware of it but today the post-production process of recording is so fine that not only solos but a single note in a chorus that you didn’t like can be changed. So that musicians have the opportunity to recreate themselves and there are good and bad aspects to that. The bad aspect is that you’re losing the first take spontaneity that characterizes the feel of some of the greatest jazz that you know and love. Those people didn’t have a second chance.

SLL: Do you think having a supportive family helps you in your creativity? Does your husband like jazz and do you find his creativity as an actor helps to stimulate yours?

JIB: A little bit of both—being in an environment of supportiveness and understanding is tremendously helpful to any artist wherever that might be—your home, your present home or past home. You can enrich yourself by surrounding yourself with people who are deep into something else, as intensely as you are into what you’re doing and that also is a stimulant. It could be anything. My husband’s an actor, he’s an actor and director but the thing that we share is that we understand what the performing art is all about –that’s what we share with each other.

SLL: Yes, so it’s your creative process that is a compliment.

JIB: Yes, because we know what it is to perform - no matter what it is—what it takes personally.

SLL: What’s next for you? I mean in terms of where you are going.

JIB: Well, this is hard—I don’t want to say anything casual—that’s important (long pause). I find that there are two opposing directions that are going on simultaneously. One is that I find a very strong interest in condensing and condensing into very simple and pure melodic sounds. A kind of reducing process or just getting to the essence of song is of such interest to me and so natural and uncomplicated. I guess that’s how I talk about this—about what’s involved and what moves you. On the other hand, I have an interest in expanding the sound pallet that I use to express my more abstract musical ideas. Going even beyond the sounds of instruments that you hear in a jazz quartet and extending the venues where music is heard —if it’s no longer in a jazz club but in a planetarium - that’s o.k. by me. Also how my music can be presented in relationship to other art forms fascinates me - multidisciplinary performances. I’ve been so interested in dance and visual arts and film. I very much hear sounds in environmental ways. I’m sure there’s a whole other sensory place that my music can be communicated in that will exist in the future that doesn’t even exist now in terms of recording process. I can absolutely feel that there’s someday going to come a day where I’ll be able to combine all these interests and sounds and ideas in one place—it hasn’t happened yet but I think that’s a direction I’ll be headed towards.

SLL: So do you think of future collaborations on a large scale where you would be integrating multiple elements—

JIB: Sure, even now, just with the DVD - the idea that a visual experience and a musical experience are one - or that a listening experience can be omni-directional when you play the DVD. Those things really interest me and I think that the technology is just in a kindergarten stage right now. It’s headed in a very exciting direction so hopefully that will be my future place.