BLOOM FINDS HER ‘VOICE’

Jane Ira Bloom first made her way onto the jazz scene when, newly graduated from Yale Music School, she bought a ticket to the Women’s Jazz Festival in Kansas City and sat in during a jam session.

That was in 1977. Those who heard her then (this reporter included) were immediately impressed. Time has borne out that first impression. Today, she is a Columbia recording artist (her first album for the label, “Modern Drama,” is finally bringing her to a nationwide audience), and her writing credits include compositions for dance, theater and film.

What is most remarkable about Bloom is that her medium of expression is that ugly duckling of the reed family, the soprano sax, which she plays exclusively.

For many years, hardly anyone in jazz bothered with this horn. It was hard to play in tune. It tended to sound shrill. Even Sidney Bechet used it only as half of his arsenal (he also played clarinet). John Coltrane was known for his tenor saxophone work and continued to double when he took up the soprano.

“I feel the soprano sax is my personal voice,” said Bloom, a 5-foot blonde whose sense of personal direction is as firm and assured as her brilliant performances. “I started out on alto, but for years I studied with a teacher, Joe Viola, who had a special feeling for the soprano, so I guess I picked it up from him.

“People ask me why I took up the saxophone, and I have the same answer Sonny Rollins gives: It was shiny. I was in the third grade when I saw one, and I just liked the look of it.”

Born Jan. 12, 1955, in Newton, Mass., just outside Boston, Bloom lost no time building an all-around education. “I started writing music from the git-go, when I was really young, learning all about chord changes and improvising. When I got to college, I learned a lot of things an improviser can do besides chord changes--other musical parameters.

“My father’s summer-camp business put me through college. They don’t really have performance majors at Yale--you major in theory, history and composition-- but I did my formative playing while I was there, at clubs in New Haven.”

Yale, Bloom says, is not a place she went to with any idea of becoming a great musician. “I was interested in the world of ideas, of creativity.”

She disagrees with the concept (expressed in an anecdote in the notes for her LP) that formal training can have a harmful effect on spontaneity and imagination: “Studying pushes your ideas further. A lot of the younger musicians now have come from college backgrounds. Not only that, I think a little philosophy or art history can enlighten any musician.”

Bloom’s influences, most of them detectable in her recorded work, were Rollins (“I met him when I was very young, and that made a big impression”), Eric Dolphy, Charlie Parker and “long periods of listening to Ornette Coleman. I didn’t listen to an awful lot of John Coltrane until maybe later in high school.”

The sexism that has often played a deleterious role in the careers of women musicians does not affect Bloom. As leader of her own group, she does not have to answer to males. “I’ve always found in any case that the people I work with relate well to me, musically and personally. They are responsive and never insensitive. I’ve been lucky that way.”

An aspect of her “Modern Drama” album that is bound to stimulate comment is her ingenious use of electronics. On one tune, “Rapture of the Flat,” a hilarious send-up of ‘50s sounds complete with doo-wop triplets, she becomes a one-woman reed section.

“At various points in the record I’m using a delay, a harmonizer--at my spontaneous control--and I turn them on and off at my whim with foot pedals. There’s also a gizmo that my old bassist friend Kent McLagan devised.

“Kent is not only a great bassist but a mechanical engineer. He designed a velocity sensor, which measures the speed at which I move my body and translates it into changing the timbre of the saxophone, so you get a kind of silvery flourish and various other effects, depending on how fast I move physically.”

“Visual music” may seem like an oxymoron, but in Bloom’s case it becomes reality. Unless a video is made of “Modern Drama,” the results can be heard but not seen in such tunes as “The Race” (dedicated to Shirley Muldowney, former world champion top fuel drag racer), “Cagney,” the Latin-flavored “Overstars” and the startlingly lifelike “NFL,” a title that led her to explain: “I’m an athletic person, a football fan by osmosis, through my father and my husband.” (She is married to actor Joe Grifasi. The interview took place when she visited Los Angeles while he was shooting a film with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.)

Bloom’s relationship with poetry in motion has extended to the scores she has performed for the Pilobolus Dance Theatre, the Yale Repertory Theatre and the former ARTS cable channel. She plans to enlarge her compositional scope, an objective that has been helped by the recent award of a composition/performance grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Helpful, too, is her familiarity with the men who interpreted her music for the new LP. “This isn’t a pickup band at all. Fred Hersch, the pianist, was on an album I made for Enja in 1983. David Friedman, who plays vibes, marimba and percussion, has worked with me off and on since 1979. Ratzo Harris, the bassist, is another longtime associate, and Tom Rainey, the drummer, joined me in 1984.” A central figure on two Latin-oriented tracks is percussionist Isidro Bobadilla, who began working with Bloom last year.

Many jazz artists who move from minor to major labels are under pressure to find a fast route to the commercial market. Bloom credits her executive producer, George Butler of CBS, with giving her a completely free hand. “I was the producer, and he felt confident in my determination to do what I thought was right. I’m so impassioned about what I’m trying to accomplish that I can’t imagine having anyone tell me what direction to take.

“I tried to make every aspect of this record as tasteful and innovative and exciting as I could make it, from the music to the mixing to the cover art. I really put my all into it.”

The evidence bears out her claims. Thanks to her dedication as a writer and her creative mastery as a soloist, Bloom may well be in the running next year when Grammy time rolls around.