Jane Ira Bloom - Chasing Paint: Jane Ira Bloom Meets Jackson Pollock (2003)

With Chasing Paint, Jane Ira Bloom offers a follow-up to her well-received Red Quartets session of 1999. Returning with the same cast, Bloom offers a sound portrait of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. True to her own muse, Bloom's portrait, while abstract, is impressionistic rather than expressionistic. The songs, all hers save Richard Rodgers' "The Sweetest Sounds," feature her trademark swirling patterns of notes inlaid with lyricism. "Chasing Paint" serves as a good introduction to her work. Its signature phrase sweeps upward to a searching melody that glides downward. Here and elsewhere, her soprano saxophone probes the lines with a surgical precision that belies the passion that imbues her work. Bloom sparingly employs her distinctive electronics, employing them most tellingly on the wild "Alchemy." Her motion-activated synthesizer sends waves of sound sweeping across the soundscape, evoking the impasto splashes of Pollock's paint. Bloom's colleagues for the date -- Fred Hersch (piano), Mark Dresser (bass), and Bobby Previte (drums) -- tune into her compositional concepts and illuminate their harmonic tugs and turns. "White Light" shows how the quartet can improvise collectively and coherently, teasing out a distinctive tone sequence, all the while maintaining the integrity of the composition. The Bloom-Hersch partnership, which dates back more than two decades, is one of the music's most notable collaborations. The duet "Many Wonders" testifies to their musical closeness. A composer in his own right, Hersch develops Bloom's ideas with the same insight and passion he brings to his own songs. With Chasing Paint, Bloom creates a series of complementary pieces that have the coherence and sweep of an extended work.