LENA BLOCH “Marina”

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ARTIST

Lena Bloch

ALBUM TITLE

“Marina”

LABEL

Fresh Sound

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Lena Bloch – Russian-born, later Israeli, and now American – dedicates this suite to the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). The immediate question is what affinities she may have perceived and what connections might exist between them beyond their shared origins in Moscow.

A former student of Lee Konitz, Bloch is a fluid improviser with a pronounced melodic sensibility. Her tone is cool and lyrical, recalling Charles Lloyd, but even more so Warne Marsh, Zoot Sims and, further back, Lester Young. Tsvetaeva’s poetry, by contrast, is incandescent, punctuated by exclamation marks, dashes and abrupt line breaks – every bit as turbulent as the tragic destiny of this sublime and passionate writer. At first glance, they might seem entirely incompatible artistic personalities.

Yet Bloch wisely explains in the liner notes that the project is not simply an attempt to set some of Tsvetaeva’s poems to music, but rather “a representation of how we, collectively, have perceived her poetry.” She also notes that she feels a particular kinship with Marina because she, too, has experienced exile, and because the poet’s life has become a model of resilience in confronting the hardships of immigration. Perhaps this explains why Bloch was drawn to Tsvetaeva rather than to a poet whose aesthetic sensibility might have seemed closer to her own, such as Anna Akhmatova.

With little reverence but a great deal of affection, the saxophonist created highly free English adaptations of the Russian texts she selected for reinterpretation. The choice of vocalist Kyoko Kitamura – a Japanese-American singer whose collaborators include Anthony Braxton, Steve Coleman and William Parker – proves particularly effective in introducing Tsvetaeva’s musicality to an American audience for whom she remains a relatively unfamiliar figure within Russian literature.

The opening piece, drawn from Verses for Czechoslovakia, finds Bloch moving away from the restrained melancholy that often characterises her music and embracing a more openly confrontational spirit. “I Refuse!” portrays Marina at her most defiant and uncompromising. The track begins with Kitamura’s piercing cries before evolving into a highly theatrical performance, while the ensemble plunges into a vigorous revival of Coltrane-inspired intensity.

In the pieces that follow, however, Bloch returns to the intimate and nuanced territory that is more familiar to her artistic voice. “Insomnia” and “Such Tenderness” are shaped by the rhythmic elegance of the waltz, while the latter allows her to reveal a gentler and more vulnerable Tsvetaeva, encapsulated in the poignant question: “Where does such tenderness come from?”

The suite concludes in an abstract atmosphere, with Kitamura reciting the original Russian verses rather than singing them.

Throughout the album, Jacob Sacks, Ken Filiano and Michael Sarin make a decisive contribution to its success, moving effortlessly between moments of delicate introspection and passages of emotional turbulence.

Giuseppe Piacentino

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