Trumpeter/composer Natsuki Tamura’s solo album “Summer Tree” (February 11, 2022 via Libra Records)

Trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura Builds a Startling Multi-Layered New Solo Album, Summer Tree

“extremely beautiful music, defined by its intelligence and risk.”

― Jason Bivins, Cadence

“wondrous facility and articulation,… a musical sense of humor … a fresh approach to improvised music… Adventuresome and rewarding.” 

— Stuart Kremsky, IAJRC Journal

Summer Tree to be released February 11, 2022 via Libra Records

Trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura adds a new dimension to his unaccompanied music, several in fact, on his new multi-tracked solo album, Summer Tree. Only his fifth solo album in a career that has spanned more than five decades, Summer Tree displays all the inventiveness, lyricism, and wit as his previous solo albums, but with a few new wrinkles. For the first time, he overdubs himself, creating dense, richly textured pieces. The piano and percussion that first made an appearance on his previous solo outing, Koki (Libra Records) return to enrich his sonic palate, adding more color and texture. He also invites pianist-composer Satoko Fujii to join him for one track, not on her expected instrument, but on vocals. The music at times goes to some very dark, un-summery places but is always superbly crafted and full of surprises. 

Tamura laid down a foundation track for each of the four lengthy pieces on the album, then added others on top, in a spontaneous but time-consuming process. Two of the tracks, "Summer Tree" and “Summer Dream” have composed themes played by Tamura’s muted trumpet. The other two tracks were completely improvised.

The result is unlike anything Tamura has done before. The title track and “Summer Dream” unfold slowly over low drones that resemble Tibetan horns or digeridoos, with layers of anguished howls punctuated by additional trumpet hisses and whoops. Expertly crafted and paced, they build tension that go unrelieved as Tamura’s exquisite muted trumpet melodies wend their melancholy way through the sonic turmoil. On Koki, Tamura debuted his homemade percussion setup comprised of pots and pans and wok. The metallic clang of Tamura’s kitchen-implement percussion returns on “Summer Color,” ringing like an alarm bell throughout. As the clamor relentlessly continues, faint drones hover in the background, low-register piano-note clusters explode and fade, while his trumpet snarls and grumbles.

On “Summer Wind,” pianists-composer Satoko Fujii joins husband Tamura, not on piano, but on vocals. This is just the second time Fujii has recorded her unique vocalizing, which she debuted on last year’s Underground. Here she stretches out more, deploying a wide range of non-verbal vocalizations, from shrieks, trills and barking sounds to longer phrases that sound like an unknown language. Tamura, playing just piano, maintains a menacing rumble in the lower register over which enigmatic piano phrases nervously tip toe. Each piece, no matter how uncanny, invites the the listener to pay attention to all the details and nuances of the sounds. The closer one listens the more there is to hear.

Remarkably, Tamura used no post-production mixing, editing, or other manipulations to create the album’s unearthly sounds. He drew exclusively on his huge bag of extended techniques and everything you hear is as it was played. 

No Tamura recording is complete without a touch of his impish humor. In this case you’ll find it in the album’s title, Summer Tree. “My name, Natsuki, is spelled by two Chinese letters, ‘Natsu’ means ‘summer’ and ‘Ki’ means ‘tree.’ I was born in summer and my parents gave me this name,” he explains.

Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for a unique musical vocabulary that blends jazz lyricism with extended techniques. In 1997, he and Satoko Fujii, who is also his wife, released their first duo album, How Many? (Leo Lab). They have recorded eight CDs together, including 2021’s Keshin (Libra). Tamura’s collaborations with Fujii reveal an intense musical empathy and have garnered wide popular and critical acclaim. Kurt Gottschalk writes in the New York City Jazz Record that their rapport “feels like a secret language … It’s rare to sense this level of intuition between musicians.”

 

2003 was a breakout year for Tamura as a bandleader, with the release of Hada Hada (Libra), featuring his free jazz-avant rock quartet with Fujii on synthesizer. In 2005, he made a 180-degree turn with the debut of his all acoustic Gato Libre quartet, focusing on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction.Now a trio, their most recent CD is Koneko (Libra), released in 2020. Writing in the New York City Jazz Record, Tyran Grillo said, “By turns mysterious and whimsical.”

 

In 1998, Tamura released the first of his unaccompanied trumpet albums, A Song for Jyaki (Leo Lab). He followed it up in 2003 with KoKoKoKe (Polystar/NatSat and in 2021, he celebrated his 70th birthday with Koki Solo (Libra), which Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz described as “quirky fun in an age of uncertainty.”

 

In addition to appearing in many of Fujii’s ensembles, Tamura also has worked with collaborative groups. Most recently, he joined Fujii and master French composer-improvisers, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins, to form the collective quartet Kaze. With five CDs to their credit since 2011, Kaze “redefines listening to music, redefines genres, redefines playing music,” according to Stef Gjissels of Free Jazz Blog. 

 

Tamura’s category-defying abilities make him “unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today,” said Marc Chenard in Coda.

www.natsukitamura.com

www.librarecords.com

Futari (Satoko Fujii / Taiko Saito) - Underground (November 19, 2021 via Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and mallet virtuoso Taiko Saito delve deeper into their duo project with the help of the Internet to make "real, free art"

"The adventurous pianist-composer teams with vibraphonist Taiko Saito...for a beautifully surreal journey."

— Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz

“Saito and Fujii are one-of-their-kind adventurous and highly imaginative improvisers. It is clear that Fujii found in Saito a musical partner that can navigate her into uncharted sonic territories.”

— Eyal Hareumeni, Salt Peanuts 

Underground to be released November 19, 2021 via Libra Records

Half a world away from each other, pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and vibraphonist Taiko Saito recapture the delicate intensity of their duo, Futari, on their new CD, Underground. After the pandemic prevented an in-person reunion during a planned European tour, Fujii and Saito agreed to carry on by exchanging sound files over the Internet. Although the format is remote, the resulting music is, if anything, even more intimate and compelling than their debut album, Beyond, which was recorded live in the studio.  “When we started Futari, I had no idea how it would come out. Then our debut tour and CD came out so well,” Fujii says. “Making Underground made us go deeper into our collaboration.”

 

In the liner notes, Taiko explains that she approached her responses to Fujii’s music in different ways. Sometimes she listened several times to Fujii’s file and then improvised. Sometimes she would go back in and add another layer of sound, or change what she’s already played. 

 

Fujii worked in much the same way. “At the very beginning of this project, I listened to the music she sent me several times and then I just played along to it,” she says. “But when I played along to ‘One Note Techno Punks’ and ‘Finite or Infinite,’ I tried several times, and I didn’t like what I played. [Husband and trumpeter] Natsuki [Tamura] suggested that I ‘sing’ on ‘One Note Techno Punks.’ I did it once and I really liked it, but I wanted more, so I overdubbed another vocal track. On ‘Finite and Infinite,’ I assembled short phrases in a way that I liked; it’s the ‘Lego approach’ that I used on Piano Music. On some pieces we both did Lego construction.

 

“I know many musicians and fans may think that we cannot make true music this way,” Fujii continues. “But I think this is just another way that we can make true music. We can fix all the notes before we play, we can improvise, and we can exchange music files online to make music. Actually, the reason I love music is because we can approach it in many ways. Music is 200-percent open to any approach you take to it. It is real, free art.”

Whatever the methods that Fujii and Saito use, they create a sound world unlike any other. It’s a beautiful, enigmatic space where conventional distinctions between sound and musical note, between timbre and melody, between spontaneous and composed, blur and fuse into a single visionary statement. So close are their interactions that it’s often hard to tell what instrument—piano or vibraphone—is making the music you’re hearing. The slowly pulsing, richly detailed title track has a massive sound presence, with textures and cryptic melodies playing across its surface. “Break in the Clouds” finds Fujii’s piano lines threading their way through billows of translucent waves of vibraphone. The give and take on “Frost Stirring” with its intertwining melodies and blending textures, is the closest approximation of a live performance. The intricately layered “Finite or Infinite” piles dancing phrases atop one another in a lively, joyful performance. Over and over again, on pieces like “Air” and “Street Ramp,” and “Memory Illusion,” Saito proves to be a wholly original voice on mallet instruments, her extended techniques, firm sense of time, and startling timbres creating arresting accompaniment for the equally inventive Fujii. 

Satoko Fujii, photo by Kazue Yokoi

Taiko Saito, photo by Cristina Marx Photomusix

Pianist and composer Satoko Fujii, “an improviser of rumbling intensity and generous restraint” (Giovanni Russonello, New York Times), is one of the most original voices in jazz today. For more than 25 years, she has created a unique, personal music that spans many genres, blending jazz, contemporary classical, rock, and traditional Japanese music into an innovative synthesis instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific composer for ensembles of all sizes and a performer who has appeared around the world, she was the recipient of a 2020 Instant Award in Improvised Music, in recognition of her “artistic intelligence, independence, and integrity.”

Since she burst onto the scene in 1996, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music. Highlights include a piano trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black (1997-2009), and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins (2001-2008). In addition to a wide variety of small groups of different instrumentation, Fujii also performs in a duo with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, with whom she’s recorded eight albums since 1997. She and Tamura are also one half of the international free-jazz quartet Kaze, which has released five albums since their debut in 2011. Fujii has established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, prompting Cadence magazine to call her “the Ellington of free jazz.”

Award-winning mallet player-composer Taiko Saito was born in Sapporo but currently lives in Berlin. She studied with marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe and studied classical marimba and percussion at the Toho School of Music. In 1997 she began to improvise and to write music, and moved to Berlin, where she studied vibraphone and composition with David Friedman at the Universität der Künste Berlin. In 2003 she founded the marimba/vibraphone-piano duo with German jazz piano player Niko Meinhold. Their album Koko was released in 2005 and Live in Bogotá was released in 2014. Reed player Tobias Schirmer joins them to make the trio Kokotob. Together with Rupert Stamm, she also created the jazz mallets duo Patema whose recording was released by Zerozero in 2007. She is a founding member of the Berlin Mallet Group, which also includes her former teacher Friedman. She also performs with Fujii, Natsuki Tamura, Schirmer, and percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn in Puzzle. She played with Mary Halvorson at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 2019, and with Silke Eberhard at the Moers Jazz Festival and Berlin Jazz Festival in 2020.

1. Underground 4:55

2. Break in the Clouds 4:41

3. Meeresspiegel 4:11

4. Air 7:08

5. Frost Stirring 2:56

6. Memory Illusion 3:25

7. Finite or Infinite 8:08

8. Asayake 4:41

9. Street Ramp 6:19

10- One Note Techno Punks (bonus track) 4:13

All composed by Taiko Saito (GEMA) and Satoko Fujii (BMI)

Taiko Saito  marimba, vibraphone

Satoko Fujii  piano, voice

www.satokofujii.com

taikosaito.net

Libra Records

PREORDER

Mosaic (Satoko Fujii / Natsuki Tamura / Takashi Itani) - This Is It! (November 19, 2021 via Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii records live via the internet for the first time with

her trio “This Is It!”

“…can’t get much closer to improvisational music perfection”

—Victor Aaron, Something Else!

“This project…has lifted her artistry to a new level…. Always fresh, always adventurous.”

—Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz

Mosaic to be released November 19, 2021 via Libra Records

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii hasn’t let the global pandemic slow her down. She’s recorded solo and duet albums at home and made others by swapping sound files over the internet. Now comes Mosaic, her new album with her trio This Is It!, her first pandemic album made in real time with one band member in a remote location. With drummer Takashi Itani 400 miles away in a Tokyo suburb and Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura at home together in Kobe, they overcame technical and artistic challenges to capture the buoyant, interactive spirit of their live performances. “This pandemic pushed me to find new ways to create that I have never tried before,” Fujii says. “Nothing can stop us from making music!”

Fujii missed the opportunity to record the band live last year. “I had two shows in 2020, both at Pit Inn. The first day, I played with my Tokyo Trio and that was recorded and released as Moon on the Lake. On the second day, I played with This is It!, but I didn’t record it. I really regret that now.”

However, from the beginning of the pandemic, the trio rehearsed online several times and enjoyed it. “I can make music exchanging files online,” Fujii says, “but this trio plays spontaneous improvisation and needs the inspiration that we get when we play together. So we decided to record a session on the internet.”

They discovered that it was not the same as performing and recording in person. For one thing, internet connections can sometimes delay the transmission of sound and they needed to compensate for that when it happened. Fujii found there was another challenge as well. “I had to consciously concentrate more on listening,” she said. “If we play in the same room, listening is as natural as breathing, I’m almost unaware that I’m doing it. But on the internet, it was not like breathing. My ears worked like listening carefully to another language; it required a little extra effort. But we found we could make music in this way.”

Indeed they can. The album bubbles over with the joy of music making, the sheer delight they take in challenging and supporting one another. They play with fierce urgency on “Habana’s Dream,” feeding off each other in a multi-layered ensemble performance. It features Fujii at her most percussive and explosive, with Tamura and Itani alternating brilliant flashes of sound and color with darker, grittier passages. “Dieser Zug,” featuring Itani on vibes, is a lovely construction of contrasting parts. In one section, Itani’s sparkling vibraphone dances around Fujii’s percussive note clusters as Tamura weaves soft low tones between them. It’s a stellar display of the ways in which the trio interlocks their ideas with compelling clarity and balance. The trio initially uses the melody of Fujii’s “Kumazemi” to guide their improvising, but they gradually move far afield from it, exploring timbre and sound as they build tension and momentum. “Sleepless Night” is a dark tone poem, with Itani’s metallic clicking and clattering making a disturbing racket as Fujii and Tamura engage in a troubled dialogue. “76 RH” takes the album out with a burst of energy, blending Fujii’s composition seamlessly with fullon free improvisation. If working virtually posed challenges for this group, it doesn’t show.

Drummer Takashi Itani plays everything from jazz to folk music to rock. He’s been a sideman with a truly bewildering range of musicians, including singer-songwriter Yoshio Hayakawa, new wave rock guitarist Masahide Sakuma; singer-actor Hiroshi Mikami; Michiro Endo, front man of the influential punk band The Stalin; West coast jazz saxophonist Ted Brown; and best-selling Japanese American pop star Hikaru Utada. In addition he has performed with some of Japan’s most prominent poets, including Mizuki Misumi, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Gozo Yoshimasu, and the late Takaaki Yoshimoto.

Trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late ’60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie,” observes Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com. Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. On one hand, there are avant rock jazz fusion bands like his quartet. In contrast, Tamura has focused on the intersection of folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre since 2003. The band’s poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their “surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty,” by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. In addition, Tamura and pianist Satoko Fujii have maintained an ongoing duo since 1997. Tamura also collaborates on many of Fujii’s projects, from quartets and trios to big bands. As an unaccompanied soloist, he’s released four CDs, including Koki Solo (2021), in celebration of his 70th birthday. He and Fujii are also members of Kaze, a collaborative quartet with French musicians, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins. “As unconventional as he may be,” notes Marc Chenard in Coda magazine, “Natsuki Tamura is unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.”

Pianist and composer Satoko Fujii, “an improviser of rumbling intensity and generous restraint” (Giovanni Russonello, New York Times), is one of the most original voices in jazz today. For more than 25 years, she has created a unique, personal music that spans many genres, blending jazz, contemporary classical, rock, and traditional Japanese music into an innovative synthesis instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific composer for ensembles of all sizes and a performer who has appeared around the world, she was the recipient of a 2020 Instant Award in Improvised Music, in recognition of her “artistic intelligence, independence, and integrity.”

Since she burst onto the scene in 1996, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music. Highlights include a piano trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black (1997-2009), and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins (2001-2008). In addition to a wide variety of small groups of different instrumentation, Fujii also performs in a duo with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, with whom she’s recorded eight albums since 1997. She and Tamura are also one half of the international free-jazz quartet Kaze, which has released five albums since their debut in 2011. Fujii has established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, prompting Cadence magazine to call her “the Ellington of free jazz.”

1. Habana's Dream 9:21

2. Dieser Zug 14:46

3. Kumazemi 10:41

4. Sleepless 8:07

5. 76 RH 11:43

Natsuki Tamura  trumpet

Satoko Fujii  piano

Takashi Itani  percussion, drums

Recorded by Satoko Fujii and Takashi Itani

at their homes in Kobe City and Soka City,

Japan in June, 2021.

Mixed and mastered by Mike Marciano,

Systems Two, Long Island, NY in August, 2021.

Libra Records

PREORDER

Satoko Fujii - Piano Music (September 17, 2021 on Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii’s Bold Experiment 

with Sound Collage and Prepared Piano

Piano Music to be released September 17, 2021 via Libra Records

“Fujii’s music troubles the divide between abstraction and realism. Plucking or scraping the strings of the piano; covering them up as she strikes the keys…. All of this amounts to abstract expressionism, in musical form. But it’s equaled by her rich sense of simplicity, sprung from the feeling that she is simply converting the riches of the world around her into music.”

— Giovanni Russonello, New York Times

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii is often quoted as saying that she “wants to make music no one has heard before.” She more than fulfills that goal on her latest solo album, Piano Music, out September 17 via Libra Records. Using short pre-recorded snippets of her prepared piano music, she edits them together to create a patchwork quilt of unique sonorities. The results are unlike anything she has done before—two extended pieces of otherworldly piano sounds and melodies that evolve so smoothly and organically you can’t tell they’re stitched together from smaller fragments.

 

“I started recording in my small piano room during the pandemic and while I was editing the recordings, I got this idea,” Fujii explains. “I thought I could put together small parts to make a big work, fitting the pieces together the way I wanted to. I could make music like building with Legos. This may not be a new thing for many creators, but for me it was new because I am a very analog piano player. 

 

“To create my ‘Legos,’ I recorded short improvisations using one idea for each, like ‘plucking strings,’ ‘Ebow on high strings,’ ‘rubbing low strings with a big felt mallet,’ or ‘dropping chop sticks on the piano strings.’ Each was less than one or two minutes,” she continues. “The materials I recorded are all so short that without shifting them around, they don’t make any sense.

 

“Then I transferred these parts into my music editing application. Putting together the small parts into a larger picture was just like improvising,” she continues. “I would play a section and most of the time without pausing, I would just drag the next part that I wanted to follow it. I could spontaneously make the longer piece in real time. I learned a lot musically with this process because I found I have a tendency to change the scene too quickly. I kept telling myself, ‘Take your time. Take your time.’”  

 

Satoko Fujii, photo by Kosuke Okahara

In fact, the opening track, “Shiroku” (meaning “white” in Japanese), does take its time unfolding. Sustained drones are the sonic thread that connects sequences of tones and sounds, each one lovely and strange, like a necklace of pearls. Each richly textured note, high crinkling sound, soft wave of white noise, and rhythmic tinkling is beautiful, but the logic and order behind their occurrence remains elusive, even though you sense it is there. It’s like observing a mysterious natural process.  

 

“Fuwarito” (which means “softly and lightly”) organizes itself around wave patterns that swell and recede rather than sustained drones, and the phrases are shorter and more rhythmic. She creates a swirling cloud of sounds with sparkling tones, woody rattles, and metallic plucks dissolving within it. 

 

“I would like to be free in the music to do whatever I want and I made this music in a way I have never done before,” Fujii says. “Of course, I love playing piano, but I think it’s not the only way for me to make music.”

 

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. “Across all of Fujii’s work, contradictions come into balance; though her music is abstract and sometimes wild, each element shimmers with clarity,” writes Giovanni Russonello in his New York Times feature article. “In situations large and small, her tender attention to detail is equaled by her ability to convey enormous breadth and textural range.”  In concert and nearly 100 albums as a leader or co-leader, she synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and folk musics into an innovative style instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific band leader and recording artist, she celebrated her 60th birthday in 2018 by releasing one album a month from bands old and new, from solo to large ensemble. Franz A. Matzner in All About Jazz likened the twelve albums to “an ecosystem of independently thriving organisms linked by the shared soil of Fujii's artistic heritage and shaped by the forces of her creativity.” 

 

Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband Natsuki Tamura released their eighth recording, Keshin, earlier this year. “The duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to their musicianship,” says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. As the leader of no less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, “the Ellington of free jazz.”

1. Shiroku 18:59

2. Fuwarito 27:00

Satoko Fujii, piano

PREORDER

Natsuki Tamura - Koki Solo (July 2021 on Libra Records)

Trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura Celebrates his 70th Birthday with striking new album, KOKI SOLO 

“Tamura tempers his avant-garde antics with an innate lyricism.”

— Steve Smith, Time Out New York

“You’ll never fit trumpeter Natsuki Tamura into any pre-fab category, he creates his own, then pulls you into them with him.”

—Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz 

Album available July 2021 via Libra Records

Trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura has spent more than five decades doing the unexpected with a sense of adventure, good humor, and lyricism. His latest album KOKI SOLO (July, Libra Records), which gets its title from the Japanese term for one’s 70th birthday, is no exception. His fourth recorded excursion into unaccompanied music-making naturally features his dazzling trumpet technique and imagination, but he throws in a few surprises, making his recorded debut on piano and playing a percussion set up consisting of pots and pans from his kitchen. The result is quintessential Tamura—by turns whimsical, focused, lyrical, abstract, and always surprising.

“When I play, I enjoy myself first. I am even more happy if the audience enjoys it, too,” Tamura says. “I don’t analyze what I do or what I think, I just pursue my feelings. I’m just like a child.”

Indeed, a child-like sense of playfulness and curiosity seems to underlie even the most moody and serious moments of the album. Tamura pushes ideas to see what he can do with them, to see if anything unexpected crops up. He deliberately interrupts and sidetracks himself, so see if a digression turns up something new. There’s a whimsical quality to the experimenting, but there’s always a serious intent to discover and explore, to express something in a new way. During the trumpet piece,“Sekirei,” Tamura interrupts fast, rippling lines with more spacious ones. He plays melodic lines with a clear, pure tone, then with a growling, buzzy sound. Another trumpet solo, “Sagi” is an abstract sound piece that is similarly diverse. Working with a sound pallet of strangled cries, buzzes, shrieks, hisses, and raspberries, Tamura challenges himself to create new sounds.

As Tamura explains in the liner notes to the CD, as a young musician, he would play drums in a band during last set when their regular drummer had to leave early. And at one time he was practicing piano every day as he prepared for music school entrance exams. These memories prompted him to return to those instruments for this CD. However he couldn’t fit a drum kit into the room in the apartment where he recorded the disc, so he substituted a wok and some other pots and pans. “My skill on the piano and percussion is poor compared to the trumpet, Tamura says. “But after more than 50 years playing as a professional musician, I thought that I could express my own music without any technique.”

Tamura’s musical personality and intelligence comes through loud and clear on the percussion and piano tracks. On “Karugamo,” for instance, he playfully explores the sonic potential of his assembled kitchen implements, curiously examining and combining high hollow rings, repeated taps, and dry scrapes into sequences of odd, but lovely, sounds. At the piano on “Bora,” he creates a wandering rumination as he moves thoughtfully between long rambling single note lines and carefully placed chords and note clusters, and uses the sustain pedal to create color and texture. 

In Japan, the 70th birthday is a milestone. The word for it, “koki,” derived from a Chinese poem written in the eighth century, when reaching the age was uncommon, is roughly translated as “rare in ancient times.”  Today, it’s not rare to reach one’s seventh decade, but Tamura still says, I'm surprised that I got to 70 years old.” To celebrate, he says, “I want to do only what I like to do without doing anything I don't like.” This CD is evidence he’s doing exactly that. 

Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late ’60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie,” according to Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com. 

Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. Peter Marsh of the BBC had this to say of the 2003 Natsuki Tamura Quartet release Hada Hada: “Imagine Don Cherry woke up one morning, found he'd joined an avant goth-rock band and was booked to score an Italian horror movie. It might be an unlikely scenario, but it goes some way to describing this magnificent sprawl of a record.”

In contrast, Tamura has focused on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre since 2003. The band’s poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their “surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty that at times borders on flat-out impressionism,” by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. Originally a quartet that featured Tamura with Fujii on accordion, Kazuhiko Tsumura on guitar, and Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass, after the tragic passing of the group’s original guitarist and bassist, Gato Libre morphed into its current configuration, a trio with Tamura, Fujii, and trombonist Yasuko Kaneko. 

Since 1997, Tamura has recorded seven CDs with his ongoing duo with pianist (and wife) Satoko Fujii and won accolades from critics and audiences alike. In addition to their intimate duo performances, Tamura collaborates on many of Fujii’s own projects, including her big bands in New York, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and elsewhere.

Tamura has released three CDs as an unaccompanied soloist, including Dragon Nat (2014). He and Fujii are also members of Kaze, a collaborative quartet with French musicians, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins.

1. Sekirei 6:15

2. Karugamo 8:17

3. Kawau 6:36

4. Bora 9:43

5. Sagi 5:18

6. Kamome 7:14

7. Chidori 8:24

8. Isoshigi 2:46

natsukitamura.com

Pre-order

Satoko Fujii - Step On Thin Ice (2021 March Libra Records)

1. Step On Thin Ice 09:02

2. Winter Sunshine 02:17

3. Mirror Surface 08:56

4. Chasing 04:04

5. Arpchords 04:32

6. Kazaoto 06:04

7. Sakimawari 05:44

8. Walking Wagtail 02:51

9. Spring Is Right There 04:34

Improvised and recorded by Satoko Fujii at her piano room

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Satoko Fujii / Tokyo Trio – Moon On The Lake (May 7, 2021 Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii Debuts Tokyo Trio, Her First Standard Piano Trio

Since 2013, on Her Latest CD, Moon on the Lake

“The music rattles the bones as often as it soothes the soul and no composer is more masterful at balancing and

grounding those extremes…continually absorbing and unlike anything else.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz

Moon on the Lake to be released May 7, 2021 via Libra Records

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii brings together a new piano trio on her latest release Moon on the Lake captured live at Tokyo’s famous jazz venue, Pit Inn. The Tokyo Trio features Fujii with two of the most indemand younger musicians on the Japanese jazz scene, bassist Takashi Sugawa and drummer Ittetsu Takemura. They form a lithe, quick witted trio, capable of terrific speed and excitement as well as subtle textures and tone colors. Moon on the Lake puts their wide range and capabilities on full display.

Although this new group is a classic jazz piano trio, Fujii isn’t primarily concerned with echoing the jazz tradition. “I of course love jazz piano trio; Bill Evans is my favorite,” she says. “But I don’t try to have an inheritance of tradition in my music. I know it comes out, anyway. I want to hear individual voices in my music.”

Instead she focuses on the personalities of the musicians she works with, independently of the instrument they play, and how well they might work together. Her connection to Takemura goes back to 2017, when he became a member of the Japanese edition of the collective quartet Kira Kira, along with Australian keyboardist Alister Spence and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. They released Bright Force (Libra Records) as one of twelve CDs celebrating Fujii’s 60th birthday year in 2018. “I was so fascinated by his playing,” Fujii says. “He has super technique, but more importantly he knows how to use his technique musically. He plays straight ahead jazz in many groups, including with Sadao Watanabe, but he loves free improvisation and he’s courageous enough to try new things.”

“I played with Takashi several years ago with Natsuki,” she continues. “He also plays straight ahead but he’s very open and loves free improvisation. When he toured Japan with his trio, which included Tom Rainey on drums, I went to see them and was impressed by the sincerity of his playing.”

The breadth of their experience is something that appealed to Fujii. “They both are very young—Ittetsu is 30 and Takashi is 39. Most of my generation of Japanese jazz musicians are either very conservative or free, sometimes they were like enemies and only a few of them are open to what the others are doing. I like that Ittetsu and Takashi can combine the disciplines and can have fun playing both. They play together in many other groups as well. I can easily imagine that they would sound great together in other settings.”

Since both bassist and drummer are so busy, the opportunities for them to play as a trio with Fujii have been limited. They debuted at Tokyo’s legendary jazz club, Pit Inn, in August 2019. Another gig followed in December at the jazz club Classics, also in Tokyo. Their third date, on September 15, 2020, again at Pit Inn, was recorded for this album. Fujii had to cancel a planned tour in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It's clear that even with limited playing time together, they have established a close rapport and a distinctive group sound. “Hansho” (which means “alarm bell”) is a playful, sprinting tune that showcases both the trio’s rapid conversational interplay and the individual talents of each member. Takashi’s unaccompanied melodic inventions are undergirded by the rhythm of the composition, but even his departures from the tune feel organically connected to it. Ittetsu highlights both his smooth speed and attention to sound, from the tight ping of his snares to his crisp cymbal work. Fujii is in a buoyant mood and her joyful, cascading runs and knotty little phrases are strung into a grand dramatic arc. “Keep Running” is a similarly jubilant excursion, which finds Ittetsu orchestrating high energy figures all over his kit. The tune alternates between full-steam-ahead sections and splintered, disjointed parts that interrupt the forward momentum but never stop it.

Elsewhere the tempos slow and interactions are more subtle but no less astute. “Wait for the Moon to Rise” is a superbly paced tone poem featuring a poignant melody and contrasting textures and colors that unify into a tightly constructed nocturnal revery. The title track is a surprisingly Romantic sounding composition during which Ittetsu’s bowed cymbals interject abstract sounds and arco bass makes eerie loon calls to evoke the imagery of the title. Fujii also revisits “Aspiration,” the title track of her 2017 album with Wadada Leo Smith, Natsuki Tamura, and Ikue Mori. Her opening solo is a brilliant example of how she moves from one idea to another to string together phrases into coherent statements. Takamura’s bass solo has a vocal lyricism that makes it feel like a song. Once again Ittetsu shows what a musical concept of the drums he has, moving from one idea to the next and developing each one completely. The joint construction of tone colors, rhythms, and textures is a tribute to their imaginations and rapport.

www.satokofujii.com

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Satoko Fujii duo with Natsuki Tamura – Keshin (April 9, 2021 Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and Trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura Record

at Home Together for New Duo Album

“The wife-husband team from Japan . . . consistently reveals a wide-open and unpredictable nature that makes

its performance a thrilling ride for the listener.” – Steve Feeney, Portland Press Herald

“Intuition and communication like that is rare.” – Adam Kinner, The Montreal Gazette

Keshin to be released April 9, 2021 via Libra Records

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii says, “If I don’t make music, I just don’t feel right, I lose my sense of self.” It’s not surprising, then, that Keshin, an album of duets with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, is the third album she’s recorded at home and released since the global COVID-19 pandemic made touring impossible a little more than a year ago. Undaunted by conditions that have eliminated performing before live audiences, she keeps making great music, whether it’s creating new projects or revitalizing familiar settings such as her longstanding duo with Tamura. This is their eighth recording together, yet they sound as inspired now as they did in 1997 when they made their first duo CD.

The pandemic has had a few surprising benefits for Fujii. “I actually have more time to compose, practice, and think about music because I cannot go on tour. I can’t even visit my parents!” she says. “Before this pandemic, we might only stay at our place for just a week out of the month. Now we stay home all the time.”

Playing and recording at home took some getting used to, however. “Last year, Natsuki and I did some live-streaming concerts on Facebook,” Fujii says. “At first it was very strange and uncomfortable to play music without an audience. Eventually we found it makes us concentrate more and play deeper within ourselves. Of course the reaction of the audience can affect us as we play, but sometimes we care too much how they react and loose our true voices. If we play our deepest selves, then we also can reach audience deeply. I have discovered so many things that I might never have noticed if this pandemic didn’t happen.”

Perhaps that’s why Keshin sounds so fresh. The experience of playing in isolation at home has paradoxically made the music more outgoing, bursting with new ideas, good spirits, and closeness between Fujii and Tamura. The exuberant “Busy Day” starts things off with a bantering exchange of phrases between trumpet and piano, then segues into a long melody performed in unison. Whether playing together or separately, they seem intent on delighting and amusing one another. “Sparrow Dance” is similarly playful, a contrapuntal weave of hopping, zig-zagging lines that call to mind the nervous, perpetually in motion activity of birds. “Dreamer” and “Drop” find the pair perfectly in sync, making balanced performances with the effortless give and take between them, a convivial blend of familiar and new. The episodic “Three Scenes” is highlighted by Tamura’s aria of squeaks and growls and a contrasting piano solo of exquisite longing and lyricism. The title track is one of Fujii’s ravishing melancholic inventions, advanced in form but accessible in feeling, highlighted by her pointillistic unaccompanied opening.

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a bandleader who gets the best collaborators to deliver," says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on more than 90 albums as a leader or co-leader, she synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and folk musics into an innovative style instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific band leader and recording artist, she celebrated her 60th birthday in 2018 by releasing one album a month from bands old and new, from solo to large ensemble. Franz A. Matzner in All About Jazz likened the twelve albums to “an ecosystem of independently thriving organisms linked by the shared soil of Fujii's artistic heritage and shaped by the forces of her creativity.”

Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black and an electrifying avantrock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband Natsuki Tamura released their seventh recording, Pentas, in 2020. “The duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to their musicianship,” says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. Aspiration, a CD by an ad hoc quartet featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim. “Four musicians who regularly aspire for greater heights with each venture reach the summit together on Aspiration,” writes S. Victor Aaron in Something Else. As the leader of no less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan (two of which, Berlin and Tokyo, released new CDs in 2018), Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, “the Ellington of free jazz.”

Trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late ’60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie,” observes Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com. Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. On one hand, there are avant rock jazz fusion bands like his quartet, whose album Hada Hada Peter Marsh of the BBC described this way: “Imagine Don Cherry woke up one morning, found he'd joined an avant goth-rock band and was booked to score an Italian horror movie.” In contrast, Tamura has focused on the intersection of folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre since 2003.

The band’s poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their “surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty that at times borders on flat-out impressionism,” by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. Tamura also collaborates on many of Fujii’s projects, from quartets and trios to big bands. As an unaccompanied soloist, he’s released three CDs, including Dragon Nat (2014). He and Fujii are also members of Kaze, a collaborative quartet with French musicians, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins. “As unconventional as he may be,” notes Marc Chenard in Coda magazine, “Natsuki Tamura is unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.”

www.satokofujii.com

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Satoko Fujii - HAZUKI (March 19, 2021 via Libra Records)

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii Takes a Musical Journey at Home

on Her New Solo Album

“She could be the most important creative musician of our time.” ― Michael Nastos, AllMusic

“Over the decades, Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii has demonstrated uncanny power and musicality . . . This music is infused with a wide-open spirit.” — Josef Woodard, DownBeat

Hazuki to be released March 19, 2021 via Libra Records

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii normally spends months on the road each year, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made touring impossible. On her new solo album, Hazuki, she lets the music travel for her. Throughout the course of the pandemic, Fujii has remained committed to her creativity and artistic growth and determined to present her music, even if she can’t do it before a live audience. Recorded at home in her piano practice room, Hazuki is buoyant in the face of adversity, playfully imaginative, and as adventurous as all her albums typically are. It is one of her most delightful and engaging solo outings.

Recording from home did present one advantage for Fujii. “I have been playing my piano for more than 45 years. We know each other well,” she says. “I never expected that I would record on it, but the COVID-19 situation forced me into doing it. On tour, I play a different piano at each concert. Sometimes I ‘meet’ annoying pianos, sometimes I ‘meet’ really great pianos. It’s a gamble. But I have to tell you that it is easy for me to play my piano because I already know it very well.”

The mental preparation for recording in the apartment she shares with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, presented an unexpected challenge. “When I’m on tour, I get in a touring mode. But being at home is being in daily life mode. I had to concentrate to get myself in “making music mode” in the middle of my daily life. For instance, when I did my streaming concerts, I went into the piano room and performed and after I came out from the room, which is very close to the kitchen, Natsuki was cooking! It was a very strange feeling.”

Perhaps the most challenging circumstance was a physical one. “I recorded the album in August,” Fujii says. “The weather was extremely hot, in the 90s. I don’t have an air conditioner in my piano room, and I need to close the door so the sound doesn’t disturb the neighbors. So in the small piano room, I was sweating. I put an ice pad on my neck and that helped a bit.” She commemorates these arduous conditions in the title of the album—“Hazuki” is an old Japanese word for “August.”

What emerged from these unusual conditions is one of Fujii’s most diverse and ebullient solo albums. “Invisible” starts out the album with some of her most imaginative and varied playing inside the piano alternating with a haunting keyboard phrase. She then begins altering the phrase, repeating it with most variations and embellishing it. The music is lively, but deliberately developed. On “Hoffen” (German for “hope”), she also delves inside the piano, seamlessly integrating piano wires and keyboard in delicate melodies that grow more lyrical and rhapsodic. “Quarantined” develops a natural flow of long weaving lines interrupted by knots of dense chords. “Beginning” is similar, with a long sinuous right-hand line punctuated by occasional left-hand chords that throw kinks in it.

Some of the compositions play around with musical ideas. “Cluster” puns on the term for an occurrence of disease outbreaks called “corona clusters” and the musical device of note clusters, the striking of several notes that are close together. The performance is built of ringing note clusters carefully placed so the overtones created become part of the music. It’s intensely concentrated with every gesture furthering the creation of a unique musical vocabulary. When she composed “Expanding,” Fujii deliberately limited the notes and intervals she could use as a way to create a new vocabulary. The dramatic performance stays focused on short, rhythmically charged phrases that build tension and momentum.

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a bandleader who gets the best collaborators to deliver," says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on more than 90 albums as a leader or co-leader, she synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and folk musics into an innovative style instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific band leader and recording artist, she celebrated her 60th birthday in 2018 by releasing one album a month from bands old and new, from solo to large ensemble. Franz A. Matzner in All About Jazz likened the twelve albums to “an ecosystem of independently thriving organisms linked by the shared soil of Fujii's artistic heritage and shaped by the forces of her creativity.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has recorded two albums and a third one, a duet with Natsuki Tamura, is on the way.

Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black and an electrifying avantrock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband Natsuki Tamura released their sixth recording, Kisaragi, in 2017. “The duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to their musicianship,” says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. Aspiration, a CD by an ad hoc quartet featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim. “Four musicians who regularly aspire for greater heights with each venture reach the summit together on Aspiration,” writes S. Victor Aaron in Something Else. As the leader of no less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan (two of which, Berlin and Tokyo, released new CDs in 2018), Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, “the Ellington of free jazz.”

Satoko Fujii - piano

Satoko Fujii Website

Satoko Fujii - Morning Dream (February 2021 Libra Records)

1. No Stopping Or Standing 06:26

2. Snow Dance 01:52

3. Camellia In The North Wind 07:35

4. Morning Dream 05:33

5. Path Ahead 03:30

6. Sunrise 08:54

7. Westward 07:35

8. I Am With You 08:42

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Taiko Saito and Satoko Fujii - Beyond (2021 Libra Records)

You would think that the ever-restless, searching pianist and composer Satoko Fujii would have performed and collaborated in every possible setting by now, but at least once a year there is a new Fujii release that finds her in a construct she hadn’t previously attempted before. Beyond (Libra Records) is Fujii’s first ever one-on-one with a vibraphone.

That vibraphonist is fellow Japanese native Taiko Saito, a young, up-and-comer who’s spent virtually her entire adult life in Germany. This record will likely be a lot of people’s introduction to Saito and they should be prepared to listen without any preconceptions because she doesn’t kowtow to set rules about how a vibraphone should be played. Like Fujii, she is capable of wringing all kinds of interesting sonorities from her instrument, a lot of which are completely foreign to it but are creatively done for the sake of art.

From the very first moment, it’s clear that Saito isn’t your typical vibes player, “Molecular” opens with a comforting, drone-like sound resembling those Tibetan meditation bowls. Fujii very gently eases herself in with a prepared piano that offers up the perfect counterpoint. Saito uses her vibraphone as a percussive instrument “Proliferation” as Fujii rummages around on the lower end of her piano’s range. Saito finally wrings notes from her vibes but even then she hits the bars in ways to get uncommon timbres from them.

Even more alien noises are created during “Todokanai Tegami,” a creaking sound as Fujii strums the strings of her piano and later, notes ring without the sound of mallet strikes as Fujii carries out a pretty melody. Those creaking sounds continue on “Beyond” while Fujii plays a series of chords widely spaced apart, as if to give Taiko the room to breathe.

“On The Road” is the first track where Saito reminds me of another vibes player at all, where there are echoes of Gary Burton. But Burton & Corea never sounded as free as these two do even on this song, and the chemistry between this pair getting together to record in the middle of their first-ever tour together is already comparable to that of the older masters.

“Ame No Ato” is a song of varying intensity and every little modulation in that intensity is done with tight cohesion, evidence that the two are listening very closely to each other. The same is true for “Mobius Loop,” even when it enters a massive, free-form vortex.

The piano/vibraphones duo isn’t exactly a new concept, but Satoko Fujii and Taiko Saito take that concept to places it’s never been before. The exotic places they visit make Beyond a trip well worth taking.

1. Molecular 05:46

2. Proliferation 05:24

3. Todokanai Tegami 08:48

4. Beyond 05:32

5. On The Road 04:52

6. Mizube 05:26

7. Ame No Ato 04:35

8. Mobius Loop 08:01

9. Spectrum 07:42

Recorded at the Oda Community Center “Subaru” Concert Hall in Ichiko, Ehime, Japan on June 26, 2019 by by Toshihiro Toyoshima, Akio Ishiyama, Naofumi Sato and Mitsuru Itani.

Mixed on November 6, 2019 by Mike Marciano, Systems Two, NY.

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Satoko Fujii - HAZUKI (2021 Libra Records)

1. Invisible 07:07

2. Quarantined 08:02

3. Cluster 04:18

4. Hoffen 09:04

5. Beginning 02:14

6. Ernesto 06:38

7. Expanding 07:42

8. Twenty Four Degrees 03:12

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Satoko Fujii's "Diary 2005-2015: Yuko Yamaoka plays the music of Satoko Fujii" (LIBRA RECORDS 2018)

Satoko Fujii Turns 60!

Composer-pianist Satoko Fujii Unearths Hidden Gems from Her Daily Composition Diary

Classical Pianist Yuko Yamaoka Brings Fujii’s Compositional Musings to Life

The pianist’s compositional talents certainly match her improvisational ones…” 

― Andy Hamilton, Jazz Review (UK)

“Fujii is simply one of the most important composers of our time: she gives new meaning to the term ‘panstylistic.”

― Alan Young, Lucid Culture

Jazz critics voted Fujii into four categories of the 66th Annual DownBeat International Critics Poll in 2018 as one of the world’s top pianists, composers, arrangers and big band leaders

Writer Mike Chamberlain once said of pianist-composer Satoko Fujii, “The woman is bursting with musical ideas.” After over 100 albums as a leader or co-leader, if any further evidence of her rich imagination is needed, Diary 2005–2015: Yuko Yamaoka plays the music of Satoko Fujii provides it.  Available November 30, 2018 via Libra Records, the double album overflows with musical ideas—118 of them to be exact. Selected by Fujii from a decade’s worth of composition notebooks, this collection of more than 100 very short pieces offers a unique and fascinating window into the creative process of one of the most fertile minds in modern jazz. Classical pianist Yuko Yamaoka’s vivid performance brings every facet of these little compositional jewels to sparkling life. 

Every time Fujii sits down to practice piano, she begins by practicing composing for 15 minutes. She’s done this since 2005. Some of these exercises grew into compositions that she recorded. For example, “052013” became “Ichigo Ichie,” the title track of her 2015 Orchestra Berlin CD. “012707” evolved into “Tokyo Rush Hour,” recorded on her 2008 duet CD with Natsuki Tamura, Chun. But the vast majority of these hundreds of short pieces simply accumulated on her piano top and in boxes.

At the urging of her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Fujii sat down and reviewed the first ten years of her diary compositions, each one identified by the date on which it was written. From this vast trove of music she selected highlights for classical pianist Yuko Yamaoka to perform. Fujii has known Yamaoka since her student days at New England Conservatory and enlisted her to perform on Fujii’s New York Orchestra debut South Wind.

Many of the pieces are constructed using a single idea, upon which Fujii elaborates. For instance, “062605” is a melody made using only the interval of the perfect 5th. On “020505,” the left hand plays only on the black keys of the piano, the right hand only on the white keys. Of course it’s what she does with the initial idea that makes the music so intriguing and attractive. 

The clarity of Yamaoka phrasing lets Fujii’s creativity shine through. She highlights the tensions created by the unusual bass note rhythm of “091209,” and the smooth, almost classical, counterpoint of “091309.” She effortlessly follows the flowing logic of the single line in “032313” and the unexpected melodic turns of the lovely “123106.” Her bright, nuanced touch gives shades of feeling to each miniature, whether it’s the wistful lilt of a waltz in “050509” or the sensual slink of the tango in “041514.” The longest of the compositions lasts a mere two minutes, which makes the album something like a book of aphorisms—the compositions’ brevity is actually the soul of their appeal.

“I still continue composing like this everyday,” Fujii says. “It is now more like my life! I think doing it has helped me expand my ideas. I don’t want to repeat myself; I don’t want to make the same music over and over. Writing everyday makes me push myself to think of new ideas. But at the same time, I have found I do have a style, I discovered that even new ideas have something in them that makes them sound like mine. Sometimes I don’t know if this is good or bad. But Natsuki thinks this is good because it shows I have some originality.”

After 11 months and 11 releases, Fujii’s remarkable and unprecedented kanreki year concludes in December with Kikoeru: Tribute to Masaya Kimura, the explosive sixth release from the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo. 

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a bandleader who gets the best collaborators to deliver," says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on more than 80 albums as a leader or co-leader, she synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone.

Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black, the Min-Yoh Ensemble, and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband Natsuki Tamura released their sixth recording, Kisaragi, in 2017. “The duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to their musicianship,” says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. Aspiration, a CD by an ad hoc band featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim. “Four musicians who regularly aspire for greater heights with each venture reach the summit together on Aspiration,” writes S. Victor Aaron in Something Else. She records infrequently as an unaccompanied soloist, but Solo (Libra), the first of her 12 birthday-year albums, led Dan McClenaghan to enthuse in All About Jazz, that the album “more so than her other solo affairs—or any of her numerous ensembles for that matter—deals in beauty, delicacy of touch, graceful melodicism.”

As the leader of no less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, “the Ellington of free jazz.” 

www.satokofujii.com