Jazz Articles about Jane Ira Bloom

Jane Ira Bloom: Like Silver, Like Song

by Ernest Barteldes
August 6, 2005

If jazz experimentation is your cup of tea, this new album by soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom is an album to hear. In fourteen tracks (all but one written or co-written by Bloom) presented as one continuous suite, Bloom and her backing musicians play around with a mixture of sounds that doesn't make much sense to the ear on a first hearing.

Although the opening song, “Dreaming in The Present Tense," does have a retro, European bebop aspect, all similarities ...

Jane Ira Bloom: Like Silver, Like Song

by Eyal Hareuveni
July 7, 2005

Jane Ira Bloom has a visual approach to sound. She is inspired by visual textures like the action paintings of Jackson Pollock (Chasing Paint, Arabesque, 2003); she adds her abstract black and white photography to her new release; but she describes Like Silver, Like Song as a continuous visual dream. A melodic dream, to be sure, with different scenes in fourteen tracks that flow and seamlessly merge from one into the other, adding new dimensions and musical interpretation, suggesting a ...

Jane Ira Bloom: Like Silver, Like Song

by Jim Santella
April 29, 2005

Welcome to the 21st Century.

With her electro-acoustic design, Jane Ira Bloom forges into exciting territory. She lifts her proud interpretation of straight-ahead, mainstream jazz into a higher realm.

Using electronic devices, Bloom and her musical partners shift sound patterns into what we've come to know as science fiction effects. The band alternates a traditional acoustic presentation with its exotic synthesized sounds, while Bloom ensures that her soprano saxophone is given a clear path. ...

Jane Ira Bloom: Like Silver, Like Song

by John Kelman
April 20, 2005

Jane Ira Bloom is one of only a handful of artists who make the soprano saxophone their main axe. But unlike David Liebman, whose expressionist bent is an acoustic concern, Bloom innovates by seamlessly and organically blending real-time electronic processing. That's not to say the sounds she coaxes out of her instrument are necessarily natural, but her command of the various devices she uses is so well integrated that it feels like a logical extension of her instrument, rather than ...

Jane Ira Bloom: Chasing Paint

by Ty Cumbie
July 2, 2004

Chasing Paint opens with dreamy piano chords, over which Jane Ira Bloom applies gentle strokes of her buttery soprano tone, presumably an homage to one of Jackson Pollock’s more subtle drip paintings. Pollock, a jazz lover, famously listened to the stuff while working, though he liked the old style variety as opposed to the freely improvised music that would later become associated with his paintings.

Bloom has a lighter touch than one would at first associate with the bold hand ...

Jane Ira Bloom

by Franz A. Matzner
January 17, 2004

Innovative instrumentalist and composer Jane Ira Bloom recently released the album Chasing Paint: Jane Ira Bloom Meets Jackson Pollock. Working with Fred Hersch on piano, Mark Dresser on bass, and Bobby Previte on drums, Bloom composed a nine movement suite inspired by her longtime interest in abstract expressionism and Pollock specifically.

It was my distinct privilege to speak with Jane Ira Bloom about the development of this project, a conversation which led us into fascinating theoretical territory. The conversation took ...

Jane Ira Bloom: Chasing Paint: Jane Ira Bloom Meets Jackson Pollock

by Franz A. Matzner
October 8, 2003

Jackson Pollock happens to be my favorite painter. Certain works have imprinted themselves on my eyes so permanently as to alter my sense of space, color, and the limits of expression. For this reason alone, Jane Ira Bloom's experimental homage Chasing Paint was both immediately fascinating and disturbing. Encountering Bloom’s provocative compositions in this heightened state of preparation only made the experience that much more intense, hesitation’s release leading deeper into the expressive and undeniably gorgeous space of Bloom’s music. ...