Further Details

Title: Early Americans
Condition: New
Format: Blu-ray
EAN: 0053479700520
Genre: Jazz
Topic: Contemporary
Release Date: 13/01/2017
Description: EDITORIAL REVIEWS
You never know what American original soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom is going to do next. After the success of her GRAMMY® Nominated 2014 all-ballads release Sixteen Sunsets Bloom shifts into another gear showcasing the kinetic energy of her acclaimed trio playing with the musicians that she knows best on Early Americans. It's her first trio album, sixteenth as leader and sixth recording on the Outline label. Her sound is like no other on the straight horn and she let's it fly on every track. She's joined by long-time bandmates Mark Helias on bass & drummer Bobby Previte and with over fifty years of shared musical history together the album is sure to be a winner. Bloom's collaboration with Helias dates back to the mid 70's in New Haven CT and her unique chemistry with Previte has been ongoing since 2000. She brought the group together in summer 2015 to Avatar Studio B in NYC to capture their breathtaking sound in both stereo and surround-sound with renowned audio engineer Jim Anderson. The album features twelve Bloom originals ranging from the rhythmic drive of "Song Patrol" and "Singing The Triangle" to the spare melancholy of "Mind Gray River." She closes the album with a signature solo rendition of the American songbook classic, Bernstein & Sondheim's "Somewhere." World-renowned portrait photographer Brigitte Lacombe contributes a stunning cover image of Bloom. "Playing in threes" has always held a special fascination for jazz artists - it offers the possibility that something can be slightly off balance and that's just what fires the imagination of players like Bloom, Helias, & Previte. With Early Americans Jane Ira Bloom stands in the vanguard of her generation carving out new territory in the heart of the jazz tradition. Don't miss this trio of "fearless jazz explorers who share a commitment to beauty & adventure." Soaring, poetic, quick silver, spontaneous and instantly identifiable are words used to describe the soprano sound of saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom. She's been steadfastly developing her singular voice on the straight horn for 35 years creating a body of music that marks her as an American original. She's an nine-time winner of the Jazz Journalists Association Award for soprano sax, the Downbeat International Critics Poll, and the Charlie Parker Award for Jazz Innovation and has collaborated with such outstanding jazz artists as Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Kenny Wheeler, Julian Priester, Mark Dresser, Jerry Granelli, Matt Wilson, Billy Hart and Fred Hersch. Her 2014 all-ballads release Sixteen Sunsets was nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for surround-sound. In addition she's garnered numerous awards for her creativity including a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition and the Mary Lou Williams Women In Jazz Award for lifetime service to jazz. JIB was the first musician commissioned by the NASA Art Program and was honored to have an asteroid named in her honor by the International Astronomical Union (asteroid 6083janeirabloom). A strong visual thinker, Bloom's affinity for other art forms has both enriched her music and led to collaborations with other innovative artists such as actors Vanessa Redgrave & Joanne Woodward, painter Dan Namingha, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, director John Sayles and legendary dancer/ choreographer Carmen DeLavallade. Her long-standing interest in space exploration and neuroscience has lead to cutting edge recording projects inspired by outer and inner space. Performance venues include Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Dizzy's Club Jazz @ Lincoln Center, St. John the Divine Cathedral and the Einstein Planetarium in Washington DC. She has composed several works commissioned through the Chamber Music America/ Doris Duke New Jazz Works Program including Chasing Paint, a series of compositions inspired by painter Jackson Pollock, Mental Weather, a suite of neuroscience inspired pieces, and recently Wild Lines, a jazz reimagining of Emily Dickinson's poetry. JIB has recorded and produced 16 album projects since 1977 for CBS, Arabesque, ENJA, Pure Audio and Artistshare Records, and founded her own record label (Outline Records). A professor at the New School for Jazz in New York City, she holds degrees from Yale University and the Yale School of Music.

REVIEW
Winner of the 2018 GRAMMY Award for Best Surround Sound Album Jane Ira Bloom & Jim Anderson - surround producers Jim Anderson - surround mix engineer Darcy Proper - surround mastering engineer --2018 GRAMMY Awards

5 stars ***** A gorgeous Blu-ray audio from American soloist on soprano sax, with her trio. With renowned audio engineer Jim Anderson, this 13-track session consists of a dozen of her originals, the drive of Song Patrol to the spare melancholy of Mind Gray River, plus a closing solo version of the classic Bernstein West Side Story number, Somewhere. The album has a stunning photo of Bloom on the front. This is Bloom s first trio album, and she seems to like the slightly off-balance feel of the trio, whose members she has long worked with before. It is also her 16th album as a group s leader. One of the tracks is under two minutes (Nearly for Kenny Wheeler) while others are over five, including the penultimate very moving one, Big Bill. The whole session is full of plenty of variety as well as exploration. It would be a real treat if all jazz albums were as good sonics and performance as this one. --John Henry, Audiophile Audition

Early Americans is the second Blu-Ray Audio disc released by saxophonist-composer Jane Ira Bloom, and the first to be distributed by the contemporary classical music label Sono Luminus. The album received enthusiastic critical response in its CD edition on Bloom's Outline label, and now appears in the original recording resolution of 96/24 in stereo and MCH on this Blu-Ray disc. The willingness of Sono Luminus to issue Early Americans as a hi-res disc should be commended. The musical performances and the sound quality more than justify the investment on artistic grounds. The head melody of the album's opening tune Song Patrol, with its echoes of Dave Holland's Four Winds from the classic ECM session Conference of the Birds, sets the tone for the whole set: a three-way conversation among musical equals. Jane Ira Bloom has been characterized as a post-Coltrane saxophonist, but her stylistic orientation is both uniquely personal and clearly situated in modernist jazz tradition. She has a distinctive, post-bop harmonic sensibility and good musical taste that rises above mere technique. Her relatively small recorded output (17 albums as a leader from 1978 to present) testifies to the close attention she pays to the quality of her work. She's not in it for the money, and it shows. Bloom's embrace of the troublesome soprano saxophone, which so many other players relegate to the second horn in their bag, is unconditional. She can produce timbres of classical purity and harsh noise with equal skill. In the brief unaccompanied solo feature Nearly, dedicated to her friend, the late and much-lamented trumpetist Kenny Wheeler, she makes a persuasive case for the soprano as the most poignantly expressive of the saxophone family. Hips & Sticks, based on a repetitive North African-style bass line, shifts rhythmic attention to drummer Bobby Previte's energetic rolls and fills. Previte, whose sprawling discography documents decades of work in the avant-garde downtown New York jazz scene of the 1980s and 90s, has been Jane Ira Bloom's first-choice drummer on her albums since 1995's The Nearness. Tempered by age and experience, Previte's drumming is never overemphatic, and his percussion palette is well-supplied with tone colors. His mallet work on floor toms lends earthiness to the bluesy Mind Gray River and underscores the spare abstraction of Say More. Singing the Triangle spotlights bassist Mark Helias in solos and a duet with drummer Previte. Helias, like Bloom, is a graduate of Yale University's School of Music, and an accomplished composer in his own right. He's a virtuoso but disinclined to extravagant displays of technique. With his superb tone and perfect intonation, he invites favorable comparison to elder statesmen like Gary Peacock and Eddie Gomez. The album concludes with an unaccompanied performance of Leonard Bernstein's Somewhere from the musical West Side Story. Bloom sings the vocal line through her horn with a simplicity reminiscent of Miles Davis' minimal statements of melody. With subtle shading, gently-slurred intervals and insightful phrasing, she breathes new life into a classic early American song. Early Americans was engineered and co-produced by Jim Anderson, best known to audiophiles as the man with the golden ears behind the mixing board on Patricia Barber's sessions. Anderson recorded in the spacious live acoustic of Avatar Studios with an array of state of the art microphones that capture Bloom periodically (and with rhythmic precision) shifting between the left and right channels, while in MCH she can be heard roaming freely around the soundstage. --Mark Werlin, HRAudio.net
Studio: Naxos Music UK
Language: English
No Of Discs: 1
Region Code: Blu-ray: A (Americas, Southeast Asia...)
MPN: SLE70005
Release Year: 2017

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