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Jane Ira Bloom has been working in jazz for over forty-five years and for a good twenty years she has been one of the elite soprano saxophonists of modern jazz, winning polls for the title of best soprano saxophonist of the year, and being among the nominees – be it critics’ or readers’ polls of Downbeat or the Jazz Journalists’ Association. Jane Ira Bloom has a superb technique, pays special attention to sound quality, is an innovator, one of the first to use live electronics in her projects. (…)

Most of the pieces on the album are mainstream, adorned with the sound of Bloom’s soprano saxophone. In a number of pieces, solo parts by her colleagues can be noted: Previta in Riding My Planet, Elias in Space Rangers, Fallacaro in standards. By the way, have you noticed the titles of the above-mentioned pieces? Space and everything connected with it are often present in Bloom’s compositions: it is not for nothing that she is the only jazz musician who can boast of … her own asteroid: at one time, NASA named one of the celestial bodies after Bloom. I said above that the current Bloom plays music close to the mainstream, but in one piece on this program she recalled her early free jazz experiments: it is probably no coincidence that this composition is named after the famous avant-garde playwright – Beckett. Overall, if you have never heard the music and performances of Jane Ira Bloom before, Songs in Space is a great opportunity to get to know this great jazz master in a very typical work for her.

Leonid Auskern - Source

JazzTimes

…she tries to capture in music the poetry she imagines of soaring in space.

Fred Bouchard