Jane Ira Bloom: Super Power at Work

By Ted Panken I Sep. 4, 2024

“I had to play the music I loved with the people I wanted to play it with,” said Bloom. “Nothing would stop me.”
(Photo: Ken Hunt)

When DownBeat last profiled Jane Ira Bloom in August 2017, the soprano saxophonist was at the start of her ongoing eight-year run atop the Critics Poll.

Bloom was then preparing to release her ambitious 17th album, the double-CD Wild Lines: Improvising Emily Dickinson (on Outline, her own label since 1978), with bassist Mark Helias and drummer Bobby Previte, who’d also performed on Bloom’s earlier release Early Americans.

“In the studio, I realized how the music was freeing up — even with all the compositional cues,” Bloom told DownBeat’s James Hale at the time. “It’s hard to record with complete spontaneity, but that’s something I hope to become more comfortable with and share through the recorded medium.”

Bloom has fulfilled that aspiration on albums No. 18 through No. 21, all consisting of scratch-improvised, remote post-COVID encounters with old friends — separate duo sessions with Helias, drummer Allison Miller and kotoist Miya Masaoka, captured in high-definition surround sound, on Picturing The Invisible (Outline); in duo with Miller on Tues Days (Outline); in duo with Helias on See Our Way (Outline); and in trio with Helias and Previte on 2.3.23 (Radio Legs/Technocracy).

“This was not a conscious choice,” Bloom explains. “We were desperate to play. It was almost euphoric when we started, creating music in the moment with bits of compositional guides, slightly different from my other recordings, on which we jump off from a more formal compositional base. We found ways to reduce the latency to play together online.”

“Jane’s compositions are quite detailed,” said Helias, who first met Bloom at Yale University during the mid-1970s, a period when both musicians were participants in a thriving New Haven scene. “She’s always pushing the envelope, coming up with gnarly stuff.”

“When the pandemic hit, it didn’t work to play written music together online, so we started improvising. It’s been wonderful. She’s got great ears, great pitch, and is super-empathic.”

Helias engineered the Bloom-Miller duos on Tues Days, which took shape after the New School, where both are faculty, brought them together for a Zoom duo.

“We really connected, and the audience felt it, too,” said Miller. “It was cathartic. So we decided to get together every Tuesday.

“Jane’s free improvisation always sounds like melody, embracing dynamics and space even when she’s playing densely,” Helias continued. “A lot of emotion comes through. She has a very strong rhythm that harkens to African music, but it can sway like the branches of a willow tree. It gives the drummer a sense of freedom — you’re responsible for making the music feel danceable, and you can play with the air and space and respond to her.”

Bloom said: “I spent years playing with great pianists, like Fred Hersch, and learned how to create and respond to harmonic motion in the moment. If that’s inside your heart, it’s also part of your spontaneous music-making. With an artist like Mark, who can hear it right away, wonderful things can emerge. Melodic motion and flow are important to me. Phrasing. Not only sound, but melodic choice. A friend called it pearl-stringing, putting notes together, because each one is important.”

Known for incorporating motion and Doppler effects into her flow and then augmenting it with live electronics since cusp-of-the-’90s recordings Modern Love, Slalom and Art And Aviation, Bloom also maneuvers her embouchure to sound sometimes like a cello, sometimes like a shehnai or another double reed, sometimes like Toots Thielemans on harmonica.

“I used to listen to Toots endlessly,” Bloom said. “I’ve invested a lot of energy into creating a sound out of this instrument that I like.” She cited a litany of influences — various world musics; singers ranging from Laura Nyro to Abbey Lincoln to Frank Sinatra; trumpeters Miles Davis, Booker Little and Kenny Wheeler, whose “sense of struggle” imbues her soprano voice.

Bloom, now 69, has embodied that sense of struggle throughout her half-century as an upper-echelon creative musician.

“Jane’s incredible superpower, particularly as a woman in this male-dominated arena, is that she always refused to just do the go-along,” said Previte, a bandstand partner since the early 1990s. “She always tested herself, tried to move forward and rejected the well-worn path. She always was willing to do things people might catch up to a few years later. That she’s won these polls testifies to her indomitable will.”

“Let’s look at the whole picture,” Bloom said, matter-of-factly assessing her worth. “Not just a woman, but a woman playing original music on the soprano saxophone, not alto or tenor. I walked through the world almost with blinders on to do what I did. I had to, to play the music I loved with the people I wanted to play it with. Nothing would stop me.” DB