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

Natsuki Tamura solo @ Knuttel House (February 4, 2022)

Natsuki Tamura is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He has lived and honed his art in New York and Tokyo. He is active as a solo artist and in his own band “Gato Libre”. He has performed at many music festivals all over the world and he has released many recordings too.

1. Natsuki Tamura solo @ Knuttel House 30:15

Natsuki Tamura piano, trumpet, wok, voice

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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

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Wandering The Sound Quintet - What Is...? (2021 Not Two)

The first Wandering The Sound album in 2018 was the trio of Argentinian reedist Guillermo Gregorio, Spanish drummer Ramón López and Polish bassist Rafał Mazur, here extended to a quintet with pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura for a 2019 concert at Alchemia in Poland, a masterful example of free improv based on a poem by Ikkyu Sojun, a Zen master from the 15th century.

"The joint project of Argentinian clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Guillermo Gregorio, Spanish drummer and composer Ramón López and Polish bassist Rafał Mazur resulted in the album Wandering The Sound in 2018. The LP, released by Fundacja Słuchaj!, was recorded in the B&B Records studio in Niepołomice. Piotr Wojdat writes about the album on the Jazzarium website: "Wandering The Sound will surely disappoint those who want to hear motifs, melodies or artistic stylizations tailored to their needs. Rafał Mazur on acoustic bass guitar, Guillermo Gregorio on clarinet and Ramon Lopez on drums take us into the unknown and do they do not pretend otherwise. They improvise, interact, but do not plan their next steps. They listen to each other and wander through sounds together, get to know them in a spontaneous creative act and bring the listener closer to what's playing in their souls." Considering that the album was a record of the first meeting of these three brilliant improvisers, it will probably not be that difficult for them to expand their line-up with new bold personalities. On stage at Alchemia they will be joined by the extraordinary Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura.

Satoko Fujii is one of the most renowned and recognized figures in contemporary jazz. She graduated from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New England Conservatory of Music. Fujii leads many ensembles in Japan, Europe and the United States. Her collaborators include Tatsuya Yoshida, Joe Fonda, Carla Kihlstedt, Myra Melford, Christian Pruvost and Peter Orins. Together with her husband, Natsuki Tamura, she has recorded a series of duets. The two also collaborated on numerous other projects, including big bands and orchestras. Tamura was probably best summed up by François Couture at Allmusic: "Now we can officially say there are two Natsuki Tamuras: The one playing angular jazz-rock or ferocious free improv and the one writing simple melodies of stunning beauty. How the two of them live in the same body and breathe through the same trumpet might remain a mystery."

"The quintet perform[ed] a comprovisation (composition for improvisers) by Rafał Mazur based on a poem by Ikkyu Sojun, a Zen master from the 15th century." -Krakow Jazz Autumn listing

1. ...Sound 44:11

2. ...Wind 11:57

3. ...Mind 8:45

Satoko Fujii - piano

Guillermo Gregorio - clarinet

Natsuki Tamura - trumpet, voice

Rafal Mazur - acoustic bass guitar

Ramon Lopez - drums

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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

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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 CD/DVD "Weave" Blending Improvised Music & Dance

Satoko Fujii Turns 60!

Pianist Satoko Fujii and percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn 

make music you can see and hear

New quartet Amu also features trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and percussionist Takashi Itani

“Satoko is truly one of the few great originals on the piano today.” — Luigi Santosuosso, All About Jazz Italia

“[Wildenhahn] weds visceral, heart pounding Flamenco-inspired dance to scintillating, thought-provoking 21st century music. … Finally!” — Dave Wayne, All About Jazz

Weave, a special CD/DVD set by multi-arts quartet Amu, blends dance and improvised music into a unique sensory experience. With sound and motion, pianist Satoko Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, percussionist Takashi Itani, and percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn make music so vivid and colorful you can practically see it and percussive footwork that adds a dimension to the dance that you can hear.  Weave will be released on October 26, 2018 via Libra Records

Amu is the latest project in a 17-year friendship and artistic collaboration between Wildenhahn, Fujii, and Tamura. Bassist Mark Dresser introduced them at an Orchestra Tokyo concert in Japan back in 2001 and they immediately clicked. They have since toured Germany, Japan and the U.S. in several different ensembles including Hakidame-ni-Tsuru with guitarist Yasuhiro Usui and percussionist Takaaki Masuko, and Dos Dos, a quartet that also featured percussionist and Radio Tarifa musical director Faín S. Dueñas. “It is hard to explain our chemistry,” Fujii says. “I can feel what she is dancing, even without looking, although I do watch her dance when we perform together, because I like her dancing. I think we are using a kind of sixth sense when we play.” Weave at last documents their extraordinary audio-visual magic. 

Amu, which means “to knit” in Japanese, is the perfect name for a quartet that so effortlessly interlaces melody, sound, rhythm, and motion into intricate and beautiful patterns. Each of the six completely improvised quartet tracks (the seventh, “Hajori” is by the instrumentalists alone) is a collective orchestration of a dazzling range of sound and motion.

The opening “Megosona” evolves from the subtle sounds of trumpet half valve squeaks, the quiet dragging of a foot along the floor, and nuanced piano chords into a high-energy climax highlighted by Fujii’s rapidly developing lines buoyed by Wildenhahn’s clearly articulated heel and toe rhythms and Itani’s percolating explorations of rhythm and timbre. There’s a similar conversational ebb and flow to “Ubega,” a beautifully shaped improvisation that opens with a multi-hued kaleidoscopic percussion solo, then moves into a collective improvisation blending flamenco-influenced footwork, soaring, whooshing trumpet, and Fujii’s short, flitting motifs and calm, stately chords. On each track the band seems to discover something new and beguiling to investigate. The bright, powerful “Bittagando” revels in speed and energy. “Gorondari” swings between sonic extremes, with Tamura’s slightly mad and frantic trumpet muttering giving way to a spacious dance and percussion duo.

The crackling conclusion features Fujii and Tamura freewheeling improvisations powered by Wildenhahn and Itani’s locked-in rhythms.

The artfully directed DVD gives viewers the fully immersive experience of the band in action, with Wildenhahn’s gestures and body movements integrated into the sound. Fujii conceives of the CD more as an invitation to the listener’s imagination. “A friend of mine said it was quite interesting to listen to the CD while imagining the dance,” Fujii says. “I think you can listen to the CD like that. In Japan we have a sense of beauty in which what is left unsaid is important. The artist doesn’t have to explain or express everything and you can enjoy reading between the lines. I really hope listener can enjoy the CD in this way.” 

As Fujii’s 60th birthday bash draws to its conclusion, look for two more stunning releases. The year’s outpouring of musical riches will continue in November with Diary 2005–2015: Yuko Yamaoka Plays the Music of Satoko Fujii, a double CD featuring the renowned classical pianist performing more than 100 compositions selected from Fujii’s daily composition notebooks. The scores will be available separately for purchase on Fujii’s website. Fujii’s kanreki year ends with Kikoeru: Tribute to Masaya Kimura, the explosive fifth release from the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo. 

After studying in Madrid, Mizuki Wildenhahn worked as a flamenco dancer in Hamburg, but increasingly combined rhythmic and motor elements of flamenco with other genres such as jazz, rock, and free improvisation in her projects, thus developing her own kind of percussive dance. She has performed with a wide range of musicians around the world, including Grammy-nominated Spanish world music group Radio Tarifa, German improvisers pianist Aki Takase and reed player Silke Eberhard, and New York jazz percussionist Jeff Haynes and guitarist Marvin Sewell. She has been invited to South Korea several times, once as a member of percussionist Jechun Park’s project Drum on Drum with her New Flamenco Trio, and for performances with the renowned Samulnori Ensemble, Molgae.

In Germany, she regularly collaborates with Ge-Suk Yeo, a soprano singer and electro-acoustic video artist. Her project Double Kick is loosely based on flamenco music and includes percussionist Dueñas. Wildenhahn’s collaboration with Fujii “makes the case that ‘experimental’ music is as much ‘body music’ as that drawn from the flamenco tradition,” says music writer Jon Garelick.

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 projected 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

Satoko Fujii - Mahobin (Live at Big Apple in Kobe) LIBRA RECORDS

Satoko Fujii Turns 60!

International supergroup Mahobin delivers one sonic surprise after another on debut release Live at Big Apple in Kobe

Quartet features pianist-composer Satoko Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, saxophonist Lotte Anker, and electronics from Ikue Mori

“Fujii’s sound world is a kaleidoscope, and those familiar with her work have come to expect the unexpected. If any artist can be said to meet expectations by upsetting them, she’s one.” 

― Mike Chamberlain, Coda

Live at Big Apple in Kobe (Libra Records, release date: August 24, 2018) captures a riveting, wildly unpredictable live performance by Mahobin, a formidable quartet of improvisers gathered together for the first time by pianist-composer Satoko Fujii. The recording is the eighth of Fujii’s yearlong birthday celebration which has her releasing a new CD every month. Joining her on this recording are trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, and laptop musician Ikue Mori. Performing without any compositions or pre-arranged plan, the quartet improvises a thrilling album of music laced with brilliant colors, compelling rhythms, and melodic beauty balanced with otherworldly abstraction.

Although they had never before performed as a group, the members of Mahobin have worked together in other formats. Mori and Fujii collaborated for the first time in 2013 during Fujii’s residency at The Stone. Then in 2016, Fujii and Anker joined Mori at her Stone residency. Anker later joined Fujii and Tamura for a 2017 tour of Japan. This year, Fujii decided the time was right for them to converge in one group to see what might emerge.

Mori came up with the band’s unusual name. “Mahobin” is a Japanese word for “thermos,” but it literally means “magic bottle.” They all loved the name. “It’s nice to have a band name with the word ‘magic’ in it,” Fujii says, “and I like it because a thermos keeps everything in it hot for a long time.”

And the music does stay hot for long stretches during the two improvisations that comprise the CD. “Rainbow Elephant” slowly wends its way through passage after passage of astonishing sounds, following a slowly evolving path. There’s a continuous weave of sound—sparkling electronics; saxophone clicks and cries; textured, breathy drones on the trumpet; and subtle prepared piano timbres. The sound expands and contracts, dense one moment, open and airy the next. Fujii plays a long melodic arc with scintillating sounds dancing underneath. Later, Anker starts her own extended melody, supported and embellished by the others. “Yellow Sky” grows more directly from soft electronic flutters and breathy tones on saxophone and trumpet to become progressively darker and more agitated with hot raspy trumpet, rumbling piano, clattering electronics, and wailing saxophone. The album is one of the most sustained abstract performances in the Fujii discography.

The quartet is truly a meeting of equals, and everyone’s familiarity and friendship with one another allows a natural give and take between players. “We all are about the same age,” Fujii says. “We are good friends. Before the show, everyone came to our place to have tea and cookies. We talked and talked, but not about music. We knew the music would be good and we let it flow without talking about it.”

Fujii’s unprecedented birthday bash continues in August with Mizu a duet CD with Joe Fonda followed in September with a duet CD with Australian keyboardist Alister Spence. In the final months of the year, there will be a new recording by Orchestra Tokyo, a CD/DVD package featuring Fujii’s collaboration with percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn, and a double CD of selections from Fujii’s “diary project” of compositions written each day before she practices, accompanied by the scores. The unforgettable outpouring of musical riches continues. 

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 projected 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.”

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. In addition, Tamura has recorded five CDs in his ongoing duo with pianist (and wife) Satoko Fujii. 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.” 

Laptop musician, composer, and percussionist Ikue Mori first gained attention in the late ’70s as the drummer in the seminal No Wave band DNA, with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In the mid ’80s she started in employ drum machines in the context of improvised music. While limited to the standard technology provided by the drum machine, she nevertheless forged her own highly sensitive signature style. In 2000 she started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, thus broadening her scope of musical expression. Mori has released more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader with innovative bands such as Mephista with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Susie Ibarra; and Phantom Orchard with harpist Zeena Parkins. She is a frequent member of ensembles led by John Zorn, and was a featured soloist with Ensemble Modern on guitarist-composer Fred Frith’s Traffic Continues (Winter & Winter). Her most recent releases are Obelisk with Courvoisier, Okkyng Lee, and Jim Black; and Highsmith, a duo with pianist Craig Taborn, both on Tzadik.

Lotte Anker is a Copenhagen-based saxophone player and composer working in the field between experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music. Her music includes both melodic (often twisted or fragmented) elements and more abstract textural material and covers a wide territory from minimal, transparency to dense and dark expressionism. Her recent bands include a trio with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver and a trio with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori.

She also leads the 8-piece What River Ensemble and the septet Electric Habitat.  She performs in duo with Fred Frith and Sten Sandell and was a member of a cooperative quartet with the late trombonist Johannes Bauer, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Paul Lovens. In addition, Anker has performed at major festivals and concert spaces around the world and has also played and toured with Marilyn Crispell, Tim Berne, Okkyung Lee, Paal Nilssen-Love, Joelle Leandre, Raymond Strid, Sten Sandell, Andrew Cyrille, Phil Minton, Axel Dörner, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and many others. John Fordham writes in The Guardian, “Anker’s rich saxophone palette takes in skimming falsetto sounds like Evan Parker’s, but she also has a soulfully desolate quaver that recalls Albert Ayler, and a sense of narrative drama that keeps her in compelling motion between ghostly impressionistic effects and brusquely percussive exclamations.” 

Lotte Anker, sax

Natsuki Tamura, trumpet

Satoko Fujii, piano

Ikue Mori, electronics

1 Rainbow Elephant 42:22

2 Yellow Sky 7:10

www.satokofujii.com

Satoko Fujii: Kira Kira - Bright Force (LIBRA RECORDS 2018)

Satoko Fujii Turns 60!

Kira Kira, a Co-operative Band Featuring Musicians from Japan and Australia Deliver Powerful, Uplifting Music on new album Bright Force

Out April 27 via Libra Records, album features Fujii, Natsuki Tamura, Alister Spence, and Ittetsu Takemura

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii explains that in Japanese, the name of this collaborative quartet, Kira Kira, means to sparkle or twinkle brilliantly. And that’s just what the music does on the band’s live recording Bright Force (Libra, April 27, 2018). Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Australian keyboardist Alister Spence, and drummer Ittetsu Takemura form an incandescent group whose performance flashes powerfully with brilliant ideas, color, and feeling.

The band is an outgrowth of a long musical relationship between Fujii, Spence, and Tamura. They first met in 2008 when Spence’s trio shared a bill with Fujii’s ma-do quartet in Sydney, Australia. In the ensuing years, Spence and Fujii performed as a duet in Australia and later in Japan on a tour that also included concerts with Fujii’s orchestras in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe. In 2016, Australians Spence and drummer Tony Buck of The Necks joined their Japanese companions to form Kira Kira. The Melbourne Jazz Festival commissioned new compositions from band for their appearance at the festival that year. “We had so much fun that we wanted to play the compositions again in Japan,” Fujii says. 

They scheduled a tour of Japan in 2017, but a scheduling conflict prevented Buck from making the trip. Tamura suggested 32-year-old Takemura, whom he knew from working in the Fumio Itabashi band, to replace him. “We were all curious to see how differently the music would turn out with a different drummer,” Fujii says.

Happily, the music turned out so well they decided to release it on CD.

One of the album’s many delights is hearing how distinctive each composer’s contribution is and how the band members bring it to life. Spence’s “Because of the Sun” starts the album with a focused burst of shimmering energy. Fujii, Spence, and Takemura entwine in a roiling skein of sound that forms the basis for a carefully shaped piano solo from Fujii and some high-note pyrotechnics from Tamura. 

Tamura’s “Nat 4” is just as explosive as Spence’s piece, but utterly different. Tamura’s written melodies are bold and declamatory and when he solos, his high notes leap into the Louis Armstrong stratosphere. In his solo, Spence proves himself a melodic improviser prone to unpredictable turns of phrase as well as a shaper and constructor of highly detailed electronic sounds. The quartet shapes and reshapes the music, ranging from passages of rapid-fire exchanges of short spikey phrases to avant-rock episodes to slow, spacious, glimmering sections.

Kira Kira Bright Force

The three-part “Luna Lionfish” is a Fujii composition full of surreal juxtapositions and sharp contrasts that some how cohere into an organic whole. And while the band engages in close collective interplay while negotiating all the composition’s twists, there are also powerful individual solos as well. Tamura takes a wildly expressive muted solo on the second part; Fujii’s unaccompanied solo forms a bridge between the second and third parts; Takemura’s taut, exciting, and melodic drum solo is a highlight of part 3, and Spence is in the center of the action, adding color and texture to ensembles and matching wits in duets with different members of the band. 

“In this group it felt like we were having a party and everyone was having a good time,” Fujii says. “And that is always the best formula for making good music.”

Fujii’s unprecedented birthday bash continues in May with the release of Triad (Long Song Records), which showcases a one-time trio with Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo and American bassist Joe Fonda. The summer months start to heat up in June with 1538 by This Is It!, a trio featuring Fujii with Tamura on trumpet and Takashi Itani on percussion. Later in the year, Fujii and bassist Fonda will follow up their acclaimed 2016 duo album with a new one. A new recording by Orchestra Tokyo and the debut of a new piano-bass-drums trio will also arrive. Other surprises and delights will be in store over the course of the year, in what is sure to be an unforgettable outpouring of musical riches. 

Keyboardist-composer Alister Spence is “utterly compelling,” according to Jazz Journal, UK, and the Sydney Morning Herald calls him, “The cutting edge of modern Australia defined.” His trio of 20 years’ standing has toured the world and released six acclaimed CDs. Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for a unique musical vocabulary that blends extended techniques with jazz lyricism. He leads Gato Libre, a quartet that features Fujii on accordion, and performs as a duo with Fujii as well as in many of her other projects ranging from trio to orchestra. Ittetsu Takamura is a versatile young drummer who can not only hold his own in a band like Kira Kira but also works regularly with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. 

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 projected 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

Kaze - Atody Man (CIRCUM-LIBRA RECORDS February 23, 2018)

On Atody Man, Kaze, the cooperative quartet featuring Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, French trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins, continues one of the most captivating ongoing musical conversations in jazz. As they enter their eighth year together, they find themselves enjoying a group rapport that few other bands share. Using minimal yet distinctive compositional frameworks from each band member, they engage in deep musical exchanges full of surprise and wit. It’s almost as if they were talking to one another without words.

“Yes, we do talk in music,” Fujii says of the quartet. “Natsuki and I cannot speak French and Peter and Christian don’t speak Japanese, but we can talk in music. This always amazes me!”

“The compositions have always been an excuse for the improvisation,” says drummer Orins. “We are very different in the way we write music, but I think that we compose to create a place to communicate with each other.”

Their musical communication is rich with a huge vocabulary of sounds and historical and stylistic references, all freely called upon and used in stunning dialogues among master musicians. For instance, the trumpeters playfully spar to comic effect on Fujii’s “Moving” but begin Orins’s “Hypnotique Sympathie” with carefully controlled and modulated long tones that establish a somber ritualistic atmosphere. (Pruvost is heard on the right, Tamura on the left throughout the album.) Fujii is equally mercurial, waxing Chopinesque toward the end of “Hypnotique Sympathie,” then playing spare, lyrical lines on “Inspiration 2,” and rhythmically engaged in a percussive duet with Orins on “Moving.” Orins is a constant source of surprise and inspiration throughout, orchestrating textures, prodding and driving, or adding sparse rhythms as the interplay among his bandmates requires. On this album, they have broadened the music with more use of space and silence than on previous discs.

The collective improvisations display some of the deepest communication among the quartet on the album. They seem to finish each other’s thought’s on “Meta-Blizzard,” in a richly textured four-way conversation that veers from abstract sound to melodic phrases and from languid tempo to high energy with graceful ease. The quiet “Atody Man” (Malagasy for “egg man”) features a hushed but intense conversation among all four players. The concentrated listening, familiarity bred of several years of working together, and the seamless use of both conventional and extended techniques give all of Kaze’s music an exhilarating sense of freedom.

Over the course of three previous quartet releases, plus June (HeliX 2017), an album by an extended sextet version called Trouble Kaze, and a guest appearance with Fujii’s Orchestra Tokyo’s Peace (Libra 2016), Kaze continues to amaze listeners with evolving and emotionally deeper music. “I think we all feel more and more free the longer we play together,” says Orins, “We always push our own limits, and play more and more in the present.”

“I have to say, I have so much fun playing compositions by Peter, Christian, and Natsuki, which are totally different from mine,” says Fujii. “This group inspires me so much.”

“Atody Man” will be released by French label Circum-Disc on February 23rd 2018.

1. Hypnotique Sympathie

2. Moving

3. Méta-Blizzard

4. Morning Glow

5. Inspiration 2

6. Atody Man

Satoko Fujii : piano

Natsuki Tamura : trumpet

Christian Pruvost : trumpet

Peter Orins : drums

Composition : Satoko Fujii

circum-disc.com

www.librarecords.com

www.satokofujii.com

Satoko Fujii: Satoko Fujii Orchestra New York - Fukushima (LIBRA RECORDS 2017)

Satoko Fujii Confronts the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

in Major New Work for Orchestra New York

Fujii's nuanced musical response to the disaster features some of her most powerful composing for improvisers

"Satoko Fujii's large ensemble music is one of a kind... For avant big band, this is an outfit on the cutting edge." -Grego Edwards, Gapplegate Music Review

"... a triumph of modern big band music, powerfully brought to life by an immensely talented group." -Stuart Kremsky, Journal of Jazz Record Collectors reviewing 2014's Shiki

"The Ellington of Free Jazz." -Cadence Magazine

Fujii conducts ensemble featuring Tony Malaby, Ellery Eskelin, Nels Cline, Dave Ballou, Natsuki Tamura, Joey Sellers, Joe Fiedler, Curtis Hasselbring, Stomu Takeishi, Ches Smith, Andy Laster, Oscar Noriega, and Herb Robertson.

Gathering together her all-star Orchestra New York to record for the tenth time, composer-pianist Satoko Fujii releases Fukushima (Libra, available December 15, 2017), a deeply moving and personal contemplation of the nuclear power plant disaster that shook Japan and the world in 2011. Fujii conducts the 13-piece ensemble in a monumental album-length composition that runs the emotional spectrum from despair to hope. With her characteristic attention to form, texture, and melody, she also provides a platform for some of New York's best improvisers, many of whom were founding members of the band 20 years ago, to make powerful statements of their own. The close collaboration between composer-conductor and performers results in one of the most riveting and moving socially conscious musical statements in recent memory.

"Right after the accident, I was afraid that we might not be able to live in Tokyo or even anywhere else in Japan," Fujii says. "A crazy-big area was affected by radiation and our country is not big. The distance between Tokyo and Fukushima is only around 200 kilometers. I felt hopeless. Of course, there were some people who didn't think it was a serious problem. The worst thing for me was the election right after the Fukushima accident. People still supported the politicians who said we need nuclear reactors. Other people in Japan thought differently and didn't support those politicians. And I have found people all over the world who think differently, as well. Fukushima is one of those issues that connects deeply with other matters in the world now-money, power, nationalism."

Fujii's musical response conveys the full weight of her feelings. Her assured handling of drama and pacing have never been more evident or used to such telling effect. The hour-long piece opens with the simple sound of air passing through instruments, echoing the sound of human breathing, creating a sense of vulnerable humanity that suffuses the entire work. "In the context of Fukushima, the breathing or air sound is peaceful, calm, and life-affirming for me," she says.

Shaping the music in real time as she conducts, Fujii leads the band on a spiritual journey through sorrow, rage, and ultimately to a stunning sense of hope and optimism. "I know we human beings can live brightly in any situation and circumstance," Fujii says. "I would like to believe it is not too late for us to make a change for the better."

Of course, Fujii's compositions are incomplete without improvised contributions from her remarkable ensemble. "My charts for large ensemble are not like classical music that can be played only by reading," she says. "With my charts, I need great improvisers to play and develop them. And with all these improvised parts, I need to conduct and give cues to the band to make the charts work, come together, and feel alive. I feel like the whole band is my instrument."

And what an instrument she has in this band, which includes saxophonists Tony Malaby and Ellery Eskelin, guitarist Nels Cline, trumpeters Dave Ballou and Natsuki Tamura, trombonists Joey Sellers, Joe Fiedler and Curtis Hasselbring, and the blue-chip rhythm team of bassist Stomu Takeishi and drummer Ches Smith, among others. With an ear for creative combinations of voices and contrasting textures and density, Fujii deploys them in different combinations, ranging from solo to duos and trios to full ensemble improvisation, throughout the course of the performance. Highlights include the close interplay between baritone saxophonist Andy Laster and guitarist Cline on the first track (the piece is continuous, but split into five tracks on the disc) and Oscar Noriega's melodic solo cradled by a lovely brass choir on Track 3. A sustained series of alternating passages for duet pairings of trumpeter Herb Robertson with drummer Smith and bassist Takeishi with guitarist Cline highlight the fourth track.

Fujii is also making available a second version of Fukushima, featuring her singing on Track 2. CDR copies of the vocal version of the composition can be ordered on her website: www.satokofujii.com/.

Fujii always tackles big musical ideas in her big band writing and sometimes turns to life's deepest spiritual issues as well. With this ambitious album, her first extended piece for large ensemble that addresses social issues, she has made another step forward with her art. "I just would like to have the listener take in the whole piece as an experience," she says, "and feel something."

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 the ma-do quartet, 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, 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. Aspiration, a CD by an ad hoc band featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was released this year 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 her latest solo album, Invisible Hand, led Dan McClenaghan in All About Jazz to praise her "stream of ideas, eschewing repetition and cliché in the crafting of her solo work, her loveliest and most accessible music." 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."