"Superior ensembles develop deep levels of telepathy, a singularity of purpose. That is evident here. It has become a cliche to say someone—usually a rhythm section player, a drummer, bassist or pianist—elevates the music. With Lena Bloch's Feathery, everyone participates in the four-way elevation"
- Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz
"The concept behind the group’s name lies in their ability to rapidly shift direction, darting from point to point like a feather borne on the wind. Lossing shares compositional duties, and rounding Bloch’s tight-but-loose ensemble are veteran bassist Cameron Brown, still an electrifying presence, and undersung drum hero Billy Mintz."
Out October 8, 2021 on Fresh Sound New Talent, recording features Bloch, pianist Russ Lossing, bassist Cameron Brown and drummer Billy Mintz in gorgeous original music
“Most impressive quartet – or rather, four equals perfectly attuned to each other. ‘Collective’ is the key word here, for this is truly musical togetherness, creating a sound all its own.” – Dan Morgenstern
“The stunning thing about every performance here is the delicate blend of composed music and spontaneous invention." – Donald Elfman, New York City Jazz Record
“..unwaveringly cohesive...bone-deep gorgeousness...complex, compelling and beautiful, sounds of the highest quality and inspiration laid down by a premier jazz quartet." – Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz .”
“I am from there. I am from here. / I am not there and I am not here.” So wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a guiding inspiration for Russian-born saxophonist Lena Bloch and her quartet Feathery as they release their stunning new album of original music, Rose of Lifta.
Due out October 8, 2021 via Fresh Sound New Talent, Rose of Lifta digs deep into the yearning, soulful, complex sounds and the themes of exile, loss, and home encapsulated by Darwish, and emerges with seven shimmering original tracks. Bloch’s personal story is also closely related to yearning for home, as it traverses Russia, Israel, Holland, Germany, graduate studies, a few years of work, and finally immigration to the United States. Her experience informs the music and gives it a deeply personal angle.
With a remarkably cohesive band featuring pianist Russ Lossing, bassist Cameron Brown, and drummer Billy Mintz, Bloch’s second Feathery recording, a follow up to the acclaimed 2017 Heart Knows, demonstrates once again her three-tier excellence as a saxophonist, composer, and a bandleader whose approach nurtures listening, trust, and musical freedom. “We prefer to not have any particular arrangements of our compositions,” she says. “Jazz doesn’t have to be risk free – on the contrary, I think risk is a great factor! Because we cultivate this feeling, given the professionalism and experience of my fellow ensemble members, risk and challenge only facilitate the result. The less safe we all feel, the better it is for the music.”
With a tone simultaneously delicate, nuanced, and emotionally powerful, Bloch leads her quartet in four Bloch originals and three Lossing originals. As Brian Morton writes in the liner notes, “[Bloch’s] beautiful record is conditioned by and dedicated to the experience of exile. I cheerfully admit that it made me cry – I am no longer young, and have no shame over this – but not because of any political stance or any anecdotal content, but quite simply because her music, and that of Lossing, is so damned beautiful.”
“Promise of Return,” the opening track by Bloch, begins with Brown’s single bass line, joined by piano, drums, and saxophone melding into cascading, conversant, recurring motifs. A resonant, wistful saxophone solo starts the second track, “Mad Mirror,” another Bloch’s original. Lossing’s searching, emotional piano and compositional acumen are highlighted on “New Home” and “Old Home,” as well as the final track, “Wintry Mix.” Two more pieces by Bloch round out the recording, the title track “Rose of Lifta,” and “Mahmoud Darwish,” Bloch’s sonic ode to the poet whose art and work inspired the album.
While the tunes on Rose of Lifta arise from dark themes, the music is transcendent. “This isn’t a plangent song of sorrow, but an affirmation of life,” writes Morton. “It is music about life. I hear it as a continuous suite of dances and narratives, the voice of someone telling her and their story, arrestingly and thoughtfully. You cannot ask for more in music.”
Founded in 2014, Feathery Quartet draws its inspiration from diverse musical traditions: jazz, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, 20th and 21st century classical music. It performs original compositions written by Lena Bloch and Russ Lossing. Based on collective improvising, Feathery's musical approach consists of blurring the lines between composition and spontaneous invention, and between written and improvised sections.
The ensemble's name refers to lightness, flexibility, readiness to drift in the new directions - like a feather in the wind. DownBeat says of Feathery, “rippling energy and sublimely weightless interplay.”
After years of live performances at venues including Cornelia Street Cafe Jazz At Kitano, Puffin Cultural Forum, Baha’i Center NYC, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Maureen’s Jazz Cellar, Live At The Falcon, the quartet released “Heart Knows” on Fresh Sound Records in 2017, receiving high praise in American and international publications including All About Jazz, New York City Jazz Record, DownBeat Magazine, France Musique and Chamber Music Magazine, to name a few. The album was also recognized by international outlets as a top jazz release, and in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll’s Top 100.
Lena Bloch is a Russian-born saxophonist, composer and bandleader, based in New York since 2008. She has been leading her own chamber groups, performing original music since 1990, in Israel, Europe and the United States, including Red Sea Jazz Festival (Israel), Leverkusener Jazz Tage and Ingolstaedter Jazz Tage (Germany), Jazz Lent Maribor (Slovenia), Voronezh Jazz Festival (Russia), Washington Women in Jazz Festival, Vermont Jazz Center Festival, and Temple of the Arts Festival (United States). As a saxophonist she worked with Embryo, Steve Reid, Mala Waldron, Roberta Piket, Sumi Tonooka, Vishnu Wood, Harvey Diamond, Sebastien Ammann and many other American and European bandleaders.
Saxophonist Lena Bloch and her quartet Feathery celebrate Rose of Lifta, their stunning new album of original music, with release concerts in Brooklyn
• Saturday, October 9 at Soapbox Gallery - Live and live-streamed
• Wednesday, November 10 at Scholes Street Studio - Live
With a remarkably cohesive band featuring pianist Russ Lossing, bassist Cameron Brown, and drummer Billy Mintz, Rose of Lifta (out October 8, 2021 via Fresh Sound New Talent), a follow up to the acclaimed 2017 Heart Knows, demonstrates once again her three-tier excellence as a saxophonist, composer, and a bandleader whose approach nurtures listening, trust, and musical freedom.
4.5 stars “…a group that crafts a spacious, wide-open sound full of spontaneous beauty and unpredictability...The music has a delicacy of four-way articulation underlain by an on-the-sleeve emotional, longing-for-home honesty in creation of a distinctive quartet sound for which comparisons cannot be found. Fresh and beautiful stuff.”
– Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz
On Saturday, October 9, Bloch's quartet will perform at Soapbox Gallery, 636 Dean St., Brooklyn. Admission to the 8 p.m. concert, which will also be streamed, is pay what you can. Information HERE
They also perform on Wednesday, November 10 at Scholes Street Studio, 374 Lorimer St., Brooklyn. Admission at the door for the 7:30 p.m. concert is $15. Information HERE
Russian-Born Saxophonist/Composer Lena Bloch Creates a Beautiful, Thrilling Blend of Freedom and Wide-Ranging Inspiration on Heart Knows
Released Sept. 25 on Fresh Sound New Talent, the album features Bloch's brilliant quartet Feathery with Russ Lossing (piano), Cameron Brown (bass), and Billy Mintz (drums)
"Bloch demonstrates a wonderful melodic sense, a tremendous musical imagination and, yes, a feathery touch"- Paul Freeman, Pop Culture Classics
"Bloch is a talent to watch, building upon the innovations of Konitz, Brown and Tristano in a singular manner."- Mark Keresman, New York City Jazz Record
True artists know to trust the instincts of their hearts before the knowledge in their heads. The title of Heart Knows, the new album by Russian-born, Brooklyn-based saxophonist Lena Bloch and her quartet Feathery, expresses that sentiment with succinct assurance. The same could be said for the music made by these four remarkable musicians, which conjures a singular and striking group sound from four individual voices given the freedom to follow their own hearts.
With one significant change, Feathery the group is an evolution of the quartet that appeared on Feathery, Bloch's 2014 debut. Heart Knows, out September 25 on Fresh Sound New Talent, welcomes back bassist Cameron Brown and drummer Billy Mintz, while adding pianist Russ Lossing, who also contributes half of the album's compositions (Bloch herself penned the remaining half). Though each of the pieces begins with written material, the sole guiding principle for Feathery was to leave plenty of space for what Bloch calls "spontaneous collective composing and instant musical communication."
In part that approach was inspired by one of Bloch's mentors, the legendary saxophonist and innovator Lee Konitz, who she says "taught me that improvising and spontaneity is what makes our music so fresh and timeless." But to a perhaps even greater degree, the spark that ignites in Feathery comes from her collaborators - whom she refers to, borrowing one of Lossing's titles, as her "Three Treasures" - whose fearlessness spurs one another on to ever greater heights of invention.
"We're not trying to produce something already contrived beforehand,"Bloch insists. "Jazz doesn't have to be risk free - on the contrary, I think risk is a great factor! Because I trust the professionalism and experience of these people, risk and challenge only facilitate the result. The less safe we all feel, the better it is for the music."
The unique combination of following a spontaneous instinct wherever it might lead and creating a sound that stands on its own distinctive merits is captured by the band's whimsical name. It suggests something lighter than air, diaphanous and Feathery's music is that, certainly. But as Bloch also points out, "A feather is something that drifts in the wind. At the same time it is a very beautiful, concrete object. The beauty of a feather is in its submissiveness and its openness to change, but at the same time it has beauty in itself."
The music itself draws on a wealth of inspirations as Bloch points out in the liner notes, there are aspects of 20th and 21st-century classical music, Eastern European and Middle Eastern traditions, and of course modern jazz and improvised music.
But all of these have been absorbed and emerge organically from the group's interactions with one another, with an intriguing freedom that calls to mind the work of the Tristano School or Paul Motian. The music moored by the compositions in the way a kite is moored by its string - kept in tenuous touch with the ground but allowed to float free and be carried along by the prevailing winds of the moment.
Another key touchstone is paid homage in the album's 12-minute opening track, "Lateef Suite." Bloch studied with the late Yusef Lateef in the 1990s, and there's no doubt that the revered multi-instrumentalist and composer made a lasting impression on her as a saxophonist and as a composer. But "Lateef Suite" doesn't draw on his teachings which drew upon 12-tone serialism as well as Asian and Middle Eastern modes as much as it does Bloch's more personal memories of her departed teacher. "It's not theoretically related to what he taught," she says. "It's more of an emotional impression of how I felt about his impact."
The title track follows, rife with an enticing but elusive lyricism. Mintz's shimmering brushwork sets the ethereal stage for Bloch's supple, keening tenor and the mysterious musings of Lossing's pianism. The aforementioned "Three Treasures" insistently returns to its exotic opening melody, putting the quartet through tensely recursive paces. Lossing's "French Twist" reharmonizes J.S. Bach's French Suite in D Minor, playfully referencing a stylish hairdo in its title.
"Esmeh" translates to "name" in Farsi, pointing to another unexpected shift in the wind that guided Bloch to a study of Persian music. Middle Eastern influences also emerge in "Munir," a dedication to the iconic Iraqi oud master Munir Bashir. Lossing's opening on muted piano strings evokes the sound of the oud, while Brown's bass line is an interpretation of a Bashir improvisation.
Significantly for Feathery's ethos, Bloch says, "In the Middle East improvisation is equal to composing. Just like in jazz, you can't generally distinguish between composer credits and improviser credits. Bashir was a genius composer-improviser and I always loved his playing."
Lossing's "Counter Clockwise" is the album's most traditional composition, a poignant ballad that takes its time unfolding. The album closes with "Newfoundsong," which captures the pianist's first impressions of the remote and beautiful Newfoundland. As throughout the album's eight tracks, Bloch and her quartet freely blur the lines between composition and improvisation while maintaining an alluring cohesiveness by trusting, always, what the heart knows.
Born in Moscow, Russia, Lena Bloch immigrated to Israel in 1990 to attend Rubin Academy of Music and Dance - and since then has traveled the world, performing in Israel, Holland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, England, Canada, Russia, Slovenia and the United States. Lena has studied with Yusef Lateef, Billy Taylor, Joe Lovano, Kenny Werner, Dave Holland, and her most important mentor, Lee Konitz, at such institutions as UMass Amherst, Cologne Conservatory, Germany, and the Jazz Workshop in Banff, Canada. Since 1993 Lena has been leading her own quartet and trio, combining influences from the European Classical tradition, Middle Eastern and Turkish music, and jazz. She moved to Brooklyn in 2008, releasing her debut album Feathery (Thirteenth Note) in 2014. The quartet from that album has evolved into the band of the same name, which features the gifted improvisers Russ Lossing, Cameron Brown and Billy Mintz. Lena is also an active woodwinds and jazz improvisation instructor and clinician, a member of the Jazz Education Network, and a faculty member at Slope Music in Brooklyn.
