Word: blooms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SOON-TO-BE Jazz Great Jane Ira Bloom looked at home on the other side of the music stands last Wednesday night, walking about the Harvard Jazz Band's practice room, giving direction and criticism to some of the College's top musicians. Nonetheless, it hasn't been many years since she was on the receiving end of workshops in basement rehearsal rooms, as a Yale undergrad...
Since then, Bloom has played the major Jazz Festivals and recorded several albums, including one with Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell which won a five-star rating from Downbeat. Critic Nat Hentoff places her in Duke Ellington's "beyond category" category...
...open rehearsal--billed as an improvisation workshop--came at the end of Bloom's talk-till-you-drop day in Cambridge, courtesy of the Learning From Performers Program. She spoke about jazz with the Niemann Journalism Fellows over lunch, and Jazz Band members over dinner, as well as with WHRB and me. She proved herself an able advocate of the powerful pleasures of improvisation...
BORN and raised in nearby Newton, Massachusetts, Bloom studied music at Yale and founded the Jazz Band there. After graduating in the late '70s, she pursued her musical goals in New York City...
...future doesn't look too bleak, but Bloom says she'll always have to deal with "that radical concept"--being a female instrumentalist in the male bastion of jazz. She responds to what must be the umpteenth question on the subject first with mock agony ("I feel like a man trapped in a woman's body") but then goes on to discuss the obstacles she has faced with insight--and without self-pity...