An Electrifying Album by Two of the Most Distinctive Players in Jazz

Soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom is the rare improviser who can pull a complete song out of thin air. As one of the world’s most electrifying and distinctive drummers, Allison Miller always has a gig – even when live music is criminalized. Together the two conjure up one of the year’s most entertaining albums, Tues Days, streaming at Bandcamp. The sound is much fuller than you would expect from just two instruments. Hubristic as this is to say, the absence of a bass isn’t an issue (although this is a great album to play along to on just about any instrument). Most of these numbers are completely improvised, although Bloom brings along a handful of her compositions. It’s full of humor, and depth, and inspiring interplay.

Miller begins with romping rudiments, then some flurries and her signature color from every surface on the kit as Bloom plays a jaunty, bouncy theme followed by some wry quotes in the album’s title track. She launches into cheery latin phrasing as Miller ranges from New Orleans to Wipeout rumbles in the second number, Technicolor.

Bloom’s spacious, desolate phrasing over Miller’s understatedly funky drive in Rowing in the Dark is one of the album’s most gripping interludes. This Is It is Bloom at her playful, deviously entertaining best, choosing her spots and airing out her riffbag as Miller holds the center with an effortlessly churning drive.

The two play hide-and-seek in a Shinto temple in Five Bells, one of the funniest and most evocative tunes here. The most expansive, subtly conversational improvisation here, The Wild Frontier pairs Bloom’s airy, pensive sustain with Miller’s restless rustling. Miller’s bottomless toybox of textures finally lures Bloom spiraling out of the clouds.

Bloom wafts in with some of her most subtly vivid, wistful playing in Light Years Away, with a similar dynamic between the two musicians, although this time Miller is more minimalistically steady. A & J’s Test Kitchen – which is what this album is, essentially – is a more lively study in spacious sax versus busier drums. The ending is pricelessly funny.

There’s some Mexican jumping beans, some sagacious retro balladry and also a lot of carnaval in Crayola. The album’s final two tracks are Bloom compositions. Maybe ironically, On Seeing JP is where drums and sax diverge most widely, Bloom’s alternately spare and amiable splashes over Miller’s clever implied swing. The two close with Walk Alone, Bloom spare and guardedly hopeful while Miller whispers with her hardware and rims.

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Literally Otherworldly, Entertaining Sounds From Sarah Weaver

OK – you open your new album with an almost nineteen-minute drum solo. Career suicide attempt?

Actually, Gerry Hemingway’s performance of Sarah Weaver’s gamelanesque hailstorm of a composition is vastly more interesting than most drum solos, and in a way it sets the stage for the entertainment to come on her latest, deep-space inspired album Synchrony Series. It hasn’t made it to the usual spots on the web, although there are bits and pieces at Weaver’s youtube channel..

Bombast is happily absent; what we get is a a very subtle upward drive from a steady drizzle on the cymbals and some neat accents on what seem to be extremely detuned tom-toms. People with short attention spans will not be able to handle much of this music, but for those dedicated to what Pauline Oliveros called deep listening, it’s a treat. It’s very psychedelic, by the way.

Long before the lockdown forced musicians to use the web to collaborate, Weaver was patching in people around the world to create ensembles that otherwise never could have existed. There’s some of that here on the record. The second number, Symmetry of Presence features bass trombone legend David Taylor playing a ridiculously funny series of ideas through an increasingly surreal series of Weaver’s effects – although his vaunted extended technique really gets a workout before the electronics kick in. So much of this kind of music is mannered and fearful: this is 180 degrees from that.

An allstar eleven-piece ensemble play the darkly sprawling, practically forty-minute suite Interhere, a soundscape in the AACM tradition. Min Xiao-Fen’s spiky pipa first takes centerstage over Mark Dresser’s keening bass overtones and the massed horns of Taylor, trumpeter James Zollar, soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, reedman Ned Rothenberg, bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and oboeist Julie Ferrara. Denman Maroney’s piano introduces icy menace; it’s not clear what or who pansori-influenced singer Yoon Sun Choi is addressing, if at all. More than a hint of franticness; squirrelly dissociation; Tower of Babel chatter from all points; quasi-baroque lockstep; ominous swells on the low end; cold spring desolation fried into 5G microwave shriek: does this feel vaguely familiar?

The album’s disorienting fourth number is just the composer on vocals and Joe McPhee’s trumpet, running through a maze of effects, challenging both themselves and the listener to find a calm center. The final, practically hourlong epic was recorded by most of the large ensemble here, bolstered by an online cast utilizing samples from the Kepler space telescope.

These melodies, created by the orbits of stars and planets millions of miles away, have a stately, gamelanesque quality that validates Johannes Kepler’s theories about celestial harmonies, but almost droll oscillations as well. Is humor implicit in the physics of planetary and solar mass? It would seem so. The musicians respond to those motives with a playful aplomb, bringing to mind Gil Evans as his most celestial as well as Anthony Braxton in galactically tectonic mode – as well as the most primitive video games.

The long liftoff sequence midway through is a lot of fun; the outer-space drift elsewhere is just as entertaining, while the increasingly pensive exchange afterward is a sobering reflection on our ultimate place amidst the dust of stars. This magnum opus has a lot to get lost in.

Whirlwind Improvisation and Smashing Tunefulness from Jane Ira Bloom at NYU

This past week, NYU held a little jazz festival of their own, featuring some top-tier talent. Saxophonist Tom Scott and the Rich Shemaria Big Band recorded a live album at the cozy Provincetown Playhouse amphitheatre on Saturday night. Pianist Shemaria’s colorful, hefty new charts brought some welcome gravitas to some of Scott’s biggest solo and LA Express hits, notably a rather torchy take of the love theme from Taxi Driver and a bustling, surprisingly un-dixielandish reinvention of the Paul McCartney single Listen to What the Man Says. Among his many wry between-song anecdotes, Scott revealed that McCartney had summoned him to an afternoon session, on no notice, to play soprano on that one – and that the scratch track, which Scott had no idea was being recorded, was what eventually ended up in the song. You’ll be able to hear all of that and more sooner than later.

Much as it would have been fun to catch another individualist saxophonist, Dave Pietro and his group in that same space later in the week, soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom turned in a spectacular, whirlwind set a couple of days beween those shows, leading a trio with bassist Mark Helias and drummer Bobby Previte. It was a great way to cap off a week of listening on loop to that newly discovered 1963 John Coltrane session that everybody’s been talking about.

While it wouldn’t be accurate to make any close comparison between this rhythm section and Coltrane’s, there were similarities between how both Helias and Jimmy Garrison would hold the center as Previte or Elvin Jones chewed the scenery. The three veterans onstage sandwiched volley after volley of inspired camaraderie and conversation between Bloom’s signature, fiercely tuneful, acerbic riffs. Helias started a game of whiffle ball, Previte flicking back his responses harder and harder until he hit on an altered clave. Likewise, the bassist’s looming, low-register bowing gave Previte a comfortable launching pad for his pummeling toms and pinballing romps along his hardware.

Stage right, Bloom was a spring-loaded presence, weaving and pouncing, whipping her horn in a semicircle for a flange effect, spiraling through achingly intense, rapidfire trills and Coltrane-esque glissandos. The winner of the 2018 DownBeat Critics Poll for soprano sax aired out a lot of recent material from her trio album, Early Americans, with these guys. Several of the numbers looked to Emily Dickinson’s work for inspiration: Bloom seems committed to helping rescue the poet from the posthumous branding which cast her as a wallflower when in fact she was puckish and engaging.

Was the best song of the set Dangerous Times, Helias’ brooding bowing giving way to the bandleader’s uneasy bustle and eventually a turbulently thrashing coda? Maybe. Previte’s coy pointillisms and then a pretty successful attempt at getting a simple triangle to evoke epic majesty were some of the night’s funniest moments, as Singing the Triangle got underway. And Bloom painted a Van Gogh wheatfield of sound in Cornets of Paradise, a more triumphantly crescendoing tableau.

The NYU festival may be over, and Bloom doesn’t seem to have any other gigs coming up at the moment, but there is a brass festival with a program TBA at the Provincetown Playhouse – on Washington Square South west of W 3rd St – at 7 PM on July 27.