Last week it was a fairly new
release, this week it’s a new release - Jane Ira Bloom’s
Wild Lines: Improvising Emily
Dickinson (Outline). I’ve been looking forward to this one for a couple of
months now. It features her long-time collaborator Bobby Previte on drums along
with pianist Dawn Clement and bassist Mark Helias (who also have been in the
Bloom orbit for a number of albums now).
While I’m not super familiar with
Bloom’s output (I have 3 or 4 albums and heard her once live about 5 years
ago), I know there are certain things to expect - her signature soprano tone
that is full of depth (as usual she doesn’t overdo the electronics), attention
to detail, a tight ensemble sound (I enjoy the blend of the soprano and piano -
not easy), and a nicely produced album.
That being said, I’ve had a harder
time getting into Wild Lines than I did with previous album, Early Americans.
But I think it has less to do with the playing, than it does with the album as
a whole. One thing that was appealing to me about Wild Lines was the spoken
word aspect featuring the work of Emily Dickinson. However, I wasn’t expecting
2 discs - the first being instrumental, and the second featuring the quartet
augmented with Deborah Rush’s recitation of Dickinson. Each disc features the
same pieces, albeit in a different order. Cool…double the music, lots of listen
and comparing different takes. Not quite.
Rather than featuring totally different takes many of the pieces on the
instrumental disc are essentially the same minus the vocal. For example, the
pieces “Emily & Her Atoms” and “Alone & In a Circumstance” both feature
the same music on each disc with the poetry spoken over the piano introduction.
They are not all like that - “Dangerous times” features two different
performances and I thought this would have been the standard approach. Even
Bloom’s trademark solo rendition of a ballad (“It’s East to Remember” in this
case) seems to be the same take on each disc.
It gave me the impression that
the words were tacked on, spoken over an arranged/composed part of the music….
and then the band takes over for the rest of the piece. There doesn’t seem to
be much in the way improvising while the poetry is spoken and as such, the
spoken portion does not feel completely integrated into the performance. As I
continued listening I started to feel that the words were acting as a preface
to the music (or in the case of “Big Bill,” an afterword), and it started to
work for me. But then why have the instrumental disc? Could it possibly be for something a bit more
radio/middle-of-the-road jazz audience friendly? Then why include the second
disc with spoken word? I found this quite a distraction, and spent about as
much time (maybe more) pondering this as I did enjoying the music. And that’s
a shame as I am enjoying the performances. It’s maybe a little more composition
orientated than I like, but Bloom sounds excellent - her tone is full of subtle
shifts in color, vibrato, pitch, and dynamics. “Big Bill” appeared on her last
album, Early Americans. And it’s nice to hear someone revisiting to one of
their own tunes. It seems these days that standard procedure is to record 8 or
9 tunes for a specific project and then the tunes are shelved. Rarely are they tackled on
later recordings (which feature another 8 or 9 new tunes), which may make
harder to associate a set of tunes with an artist. But that's for another blog post.
Had Wild Lines come with only one
disc (preferably with the spoken word), I think I would have quite a different
listening experience over the last few days. But now, with my initial confusion out
of the way, I can just relax and listen to the music.
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