Jane Bloom: A Live Wire in Electronic Jazz

“For me, the process of change and development is grasping a part of what it means to be a musician and improviser in 1989,” soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom said by phone from her New York City apartment.

“Being an improviser encompasses embracing what are the important influences of your times and reflecting and reacting to it. I suppose the live electronics are part of my statement about what it means to be improvising today.”

Bloom, who is appearing with her trio tonight and Thursday at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood, first attracted widespread attention as an improviser and composer in jazz circles with her 1983 album “Mighty Lights.” But when she resurfaced two years ago with the “Modern Drama” album for Columbia, Bloom was employing a personally designed effects system that electronically altered the tone of the instrument.

The advent of electronics often signals that a jazz artist has resorted to stale fusion formulas, but Bloom has used electronics in a genuinely improvisatory way where the effects remain subservient to her musical objectives. “Modern Drama” included pieces Bloom composed around specific “electronic structures,” but her current Columbia album, “Slalom,” downplayed the electronics except when they suited the improvisational demands of her pieces.

Those effects--which can make a single note sound like a broad smear rather than a sharply defined point--are controlled by foot pedals on stage.

“The key thing about the setup is that it’s spontaneous,” said Bloom, 34. “I have the ability to trigger the sounds on and off just as quickly as my ideas can happen; I try to make that flow from my acoustic sound and my electronic thoughts be seamless.

“The saxophone is still at the core of what is impelling the electronics. I’ve spent so much time and energy creating a sound on the instrument that having some balance between it and the electronics--knowing that the breath, phrasing and timbre of the saxophone is behind what I’m doing--is still important to me.”

A Boston native, Bloom began playing alto saxophone before gravitating toward the soprano. Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman were early influences and her hometown teacher Joe Viola a major inspiration but Bloom’s formative musical experience came when she attended Yale University from 1972 to 1977.

Her contemporaries there included the critically acclaimed pianist-composer Anthony Davis and trumpeter-theorist Leo Smith. Bloom credited the latter with motivating her to release the two self-produced albums on her own Outline label that launched her recording career in the late ‘70s.

“If you wanted to document your music, you learned how to do it yourself,” said Bloom. “Leo Smith had been doing it for years when the recording industry wasn’t interested in new jazz or young improvisers. In retrospect, we had to be as creative about how to get the music out and where to perform it as we did about the music itself.”

Bloom’s albums, along with a stint with vibes player David Friedman, drew some attention but her breakthrough was “Mighty Lights.” At the time, Bloom was also working with an electronics specialist in a contemporary new music vein. Those experiments spurred her to investigate techniques and technology that could create what she described as a “Doppler-like effect” with her instrument.

Her attempt to make the way sound changes when it moves a part of her instrumental vocabulary is an extension of Bloom’s fascination with motion and velocity. Some compositions have been inspired by athletes ranging from ice dancing champions Torvill and Dean to drag racer Shirley Muldowney and NFL players.

Bloom has composed pieces for the Pilobolus Dance Theatre and other dance companies, the Yale Repertory Theater and has been awarded a composition-performance grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also the first musician commissioned to be a member of the NASA art program and is working on a suite of compositions after viewing the launch and landing of the shuttle Discovery last year.

Her chief allegiance remains to the world of jazz improvisers, despite the lack of live performance opportunities for herself and others attempting to break new ground rather than wring new variations out of traditional jazz models. But Bloom indicated her large-scale ambitions might extend beyond just writing for a sizable ensemble to encompass more of a multimedia performance approach.

“I would like to present the improvisational music I do in a more theatrical context,” said Bloom. “I have a bent toward performance art and through my husband (actor Joe Grifasi) have (seen) the potential and power of the theatrical craft. I like the combining of all those disciplines--and film and video as well--so I guess I have an artistic scheme that could embrace things that go beyond the musical world.”