Full of heart, intimacy, and searing depth, Marina, out November 14, 2025 via Fresh Sound Records, features Bloch’s quintet with vocalist Kyoto Kitamura.
“Bloch’s sound suggests the complex worlds of players like Warne Marsh, richly moving yet never cliched.” – Donald Elfman, New York City Jazz Record
“…unwaveringly cohesive…bone-deep gorgeousness…complex, compelling and beautiful, sounds of the highest quality and inspiration.” – Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz
Acclaimed Russian-born saxophonist and composer Lena Bloch’s new album Marina, showcasing a commissioned jazz suite for ensemble and voice and out November 14, 2025 via Fresh Sound Records, could not be more timely. “Throughout my life, Tsvetaeva has been a model of resilience as an immigrant, an artist and a woman,” says Bloch, “all of which have been under siege in modern political discourse, all the more reason to amplify her voice for a modern audience.”
The album features Bloch’s quintet with vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, pianist Jacob Sacks, bassist Ken Filiano, and drummer Michael Sarin. The jazz suite, which sets Bloch’s own English translations of Tsvetaeva’s works, was commissioned in 2022 through a grant from Chamber Music America.
Though hailed as one of the greatest poets of 20th century Russian and world literature, Marina Tsvetaeva is little known in the United States. Born in Moscow in 1892 to a professor and a concert pianist, she published her first collection of poems at 18. She lived during turbulent years in Russian history, facing separation from her husband and children and leaving home to live in Berlin, Prague, and Paris, eventually returning to the Soviet Union where her husband was executed and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp.
Bloch was also born in Moscow, immigrating to Israel then Europe, where she played jazz for 12 years before settling in New York in 2008. She quickly became a significant contributor to the city’s fertile jazz scene. Her unique cultural background contributes to her original style, personal expression, and broad range of influences, from Eastern European and Middle Eastern traditions to 20th and 21st century classical music.
As one of the first jazz artists to interpret Tsvetaeva’s poetry through music, Bloch uses her own English translations of Tsvetaeva’s work to extemporize and reimagine her poetic legacy. Says Bloch, “Tsvetaeva’s themes are especially relevant to this country of immigrants, now more than ever. Her poetry never bemoaned the status of an alien in a strange land, never dwelled on the loneliness or isolation of a life in exile. Instead, her work celebrated strength: the power she had to speak freely despite all circumstances, the indomitable will to persevere. Those aspects of her work resonate with me as a lifelong nomad myself, and they will resonate with countless immigrants in this country.”
© Randy Thaler
Bloch’s philosophical approach to setting poetry starts from the premise that poetry itself is musical, so adding musicians to the text is about perception, understanding, and interpretation. “The most interesting thing,” she says, “is how our feelings and our perception intertwine in the process of collective music-making.” As these five masters of improvisation respond to the texts and each other, they create a series of emotionally powerful, dynamic soundscapes.
Bloch’s interpretive approach is front and center from the first notes of the first track, “Refuse,” as Filiano plucks a plaintive, inquisitive bass line while Kitamura voices an existential cry of defiance. On “Insomnia,” the rhythm section weaves its way into the wistful melody of Bloch’s sweet, smoky saxophone, making way for Kitamura’s pure, melancholy vocals. Imbued with gentle sensuality, “Such Tenderness” showcases a back-and-forth dance between Bloch’s expressive, shimmering saxophone and Kitamura’s resonant voice. Bloch’s settings of “Tired” and “Immeasurable” mine through sound Tsvetaeva’s passion, lyricism, and portrayal of women’s experiences, all reflected with power and panache in the title track, a bold, part spoken, part sung statement of survival and individuality. The album closes with “The Time Will Come,” a poem about the endurance of art and spirit.
In Tsvetaeva, Bloch has found an artistic soulmate. With Marina, she brings forth themes both universal and personal through breathtaking composition, improvisation, and performance. As Kitamura and the band deliver the album’s final linguistic and musical phrases – “for all my poems/like for precious wine/The time will come” – it’s as though they are channeling Tsvetaeva’s very soul, and definitively declaring that yes, for Tsvetaeva and Bloch, the time has definitely come.
***BIO ***
© Chris Drukker
Russian-born saxophonist, composer and bandleader Lena Bloch has been based in New York since 2008. She has been leading her own chamber groups and performing original music since 1990. In 2014 she founded her Feathery Quartet featuring Russ Lossing, Cameron Brown and Billy Mintz. The group has released four highly acclaimed albums (Feathery, Heart Knows, Rose Of Lifta, Live at iBeam Brooklyn) and earned a 2024 Brooklyn Arts Council grant. Bloch has performed 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, Mal Waldron, Roberta Piket, Sumi Tonooka, Vishnu Wood, Harvey Diamond, Sebastien Ammann and many other American and European bandleaders.
Album Release Concert Saturday, November 15 at IBeam, Brooklyn, NY
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