Songs In Space

[Jane Ira Bloom's] playing and sound are captivating. What a beautiful tone she gets! [...] The music is specifically mixed for surround sound in 5.1.4 immersive audio, though it also sounds terrific in high-definition stereo. In fact, if I hadn’t heard the surround mixes at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where producers/engineers Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz invited me to have a listen, I’d live happily ever after with the sublime sonics and spatiality of the stereo version. But I did hear the immersive mixes, and wow, forgive me for the weak pun but Sounds in Space is absolutely out of this world in multichannel.

I’ve been listening to the 5.1.4 discrete immersive DXD version for several days, and feel like I’m in the room with the four musicians. The sense of space around the instruments, the envelopment, and the lively feel to this album are very special.

Whether it’s the opening piano played by Dominic Fallaco on track four, I Could Have Danced All Night, or Jane Ira Bloom’s accompanying soprano sax that comes in around ten second into the track, the sound of both instruments alone and together, places the listener in a unique space that’s only possible through immersive audio formats.

My favorite track on the album is track eight, Cry Without An Alphabet. The sound is ethereal yet at the same time incredibly vibrant and right there within my grasp. It’s an emotional track with an apropos name, as it touches the listener’s heart without saying a word. The immersive mix makes me feel like right there in the recording studio, maintaining all the tone and color of the piano and soprano sax, wile also allowing the instruments to breathe in a natural sounding environment. There isn’t a sacrifice to have one or the other.

Kudos to the engineering team at Anderson Audio New York for capturing this beautiful piece of music and enabling lucky listeners to experience it like never before. It’s a real treat.

The seven trio tracks are brisker, some offering a pleasingly direct follow on to Early Americans. These are brief – although space is, you know, spacious, Bloom here leans toward near miniatures, with a couple of tracks coming in under three minutes – but deviously catchy. And there are one or two freer excursions, on Polaris and Escape Velocity, that benefit from the more extempore approach developed by Bloom and Helias during the pandemic when they just wanted to play (there is already a fascinating digital album of such pieces from 2023, in which the trio reconvenes via Previte overdubbing drum parts on previously recorded duo excursions for soprano and bass). The clutch of new pieces here make this set a very welcome addition to the earlier album, my personal favourite from her discography.

And the sound? Well, surround sound aside, and hoping WAV files heard on decent headphones can do some justice to the work here, I can say that everything is beautifully recorded. The sustain on Helias’s plucked bass rings out, the lightest of cymbal washes, or mallet caress of drum head come across with the immediacy of a trap set in your listening room. And Bloom’s soprano sound, long one of the richest and most readily identifiable personal signatures on any instrument, is captured in all its glory.

A consolidation, rather than a departure, then, but a consolidation of a superbly accomplished career. Bloom has just turned seventy, so we may hope for more from this peerless practitioner, but this one makes a well-burnished addition to her oeuvre for now.

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.

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