Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis (May 13, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Amaryllis is a six-song suite performed by a newly formed sextet of master improvisers, including Halvorson, Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). The Mivos String Quartet joins for three of the songs, making this the largest ensemble for which Halvorson has written to date. The suite showcases Halvorson’s many musical influences from jazz, experimental, new music, and beyond.

1. Night Shift

2. Anesthesia

3. Amaryllis

4. Side Effect

5. Hoodwink

6. 892 Teeth

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Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double album March 4, via Firehouse 12

Drummer/composer Tomas Fujiwara reconvenes his unique sextet Triple Double for a collection of exhilarating new music inspired by dance and protest

March, due out March 4, 2022 via Firehouse 12 Records, features drummers Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver, guitarists Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook, and trumpet/cornet players Ralph Alessi and Taylor Ho Bynum

"Deliberately seeing double in the cause of exploratory jazz, Fujiwara brings together instrumentalists primed to rub each other in all the right and creatively wrong ways."

– The New Yorker

"[The six musicians’] collective talent and Fujiwara’s innovative leadership make for a tonic of unpredictability… A triple scoop of great music."

– Britt Robson, JazzTimes

Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double celebrates album Friday, March 4 at The Stone, NYC

Tomas Fujiwara, photo by Brian Cohen

Parsing out the various combinations possible within Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double feels something like wandering through a hall of mirrors. Look at it one way and you might see two horn/guitar/drum trios; turn slightly and suddenly it becomes three paired artists taking their shared instruments in radically different directions. Despite the unusual instrumentation of the ensemble, however, Triple Double is at its core a group of six distinctive individuals, each among the most innovative and singular voices in contemporary creative music – drummers Tomas Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver, guitarists Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook, and trumpeter Ralph Alessi and cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum. 

On the sextet’s second album, March (due out March 4, 2022 via Firehouse 12 Records), Triple Double has also become a band in the most thrilling sense, sharing a scintillating chemistry and a sense of musical mission that remains evident no matter how far apart the various pairings and triplings stretch the music in far-flung directions.

Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double, photo by Nicki Chavoya

“On the first album [2017’s Triple Double], the band was still relatively new,” Fujiwara explains. “There were a few people in the group that had never played together before. Since then we’ve spent a lot more time touring and playing together, so I feel like those connections and the rapport within the group have really deepened. That influenced my writing for this album because now I had a reference point for different places the band had gone, and I was also conscious of where else I wanted to push us as a group.”

The formation of Triple Double did bring together some new pairings – Alessi and Bynum had never crossed paths, and the drummers had never had the opportunity to share the stage despite Fujiwara’s longheld admiration for Cleaver. At the same time, the grouping also reconvened some well-established hook-ups (to borrow the name of another Fujiwara ensemble). Bynum and Halvorson are both among Fujiwara’s most frequent collaborators, in each other’s ensembles as well as (in Fujiwara and Halvorson’s case) in the collective trio Thumbscrew. Triple Double grew out of a trio that the drummer formed with Alessi and Seabrook.

“When I first put the band together I made a pretty exhaustive list of all the different combinations of the six of us,” Fujiwara says. “On this album I really wanted to hone in on the subtle shifts that can happen with the addition and subtraction of different musicians in the ensemble. It feels like there are endless possibilities, which is really exciting.”

Opener “Pack Up, Coming For You” offers perhaps the most explicit example. The tune begins with the trio of Fujiwara, Bynum and Halvorson. After they trade improvisations their counterparts emerge and the second trio takes over for a time. Finally all six combine and the full scope of the group dynamic is revealed. Like its predecessor, March includes an improvised duet by Fujiwara and Cleaver in tribute to the bandleader’s childhood teacher, Alan Dawson.

The unique combination of instruments is in some ways a challenge, offering little guidance for a composer. At the same time, Fujiwara found the lack of precedent refreshing. “Not having a blueprint can be challenging,” he explains, “but at the same time it can be quite liberating and inspiring. If you’re leading a guitar trio and want to do something personal with it, it can be difficult to get out from under the shadow of all the great guitar trios that came before. With this there isn't that history, so it takes away expectations. That challenge is fun for me.”

Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double, photo by Nicki Chavoya

Fujiwara took on several disparate challenges in the crafting of March. His vibraphone playing is given a much more prominent role, while the floating, airy “Life Only Gets More” was instigated by the fact that drummers are so rarely asked to solo over ballads. The album was also recorded fairly quickly and spontaneously, despite the challenging material – an approach prompted by Fujiwara’s love of classic Blue Note Records.

“On many of the sessions they would just call in a group of musicians, they’d show up, the bandleader would have some charts on the music stand, they’d run through them and just record them. And yet they're now eternal classics that we love. I wanted to capture some of that magic.”

Like the name of the ensemble, the new album’s title also folds multiple meanings into a deceptively simple word. At its most basic, March is the month of the album release – but of course it’s a loaded date, falling exactly two years after much of the world went into pandemic lockdown and ensembles like Triple Double were suddenly indefinitely separated. The gulf has proved a long one for this band in particular, having recorded the album in late 2019.

But March also implies movement, as suggested by the felt assemblages that grace the album’s colorful artwork. The multi-hued group embracing on the cover could be dancers stepping in rhythm or protesters parading for a cause. All of those meanings danced in Fujiwara’s head as he penned the music for March, especially as he titled the tunes in the midst of the tense protests that erupted throughout 2020.

“There's something about marching that is very evocative to me,” the drummer explains. “It's a coordinated activity that always has a group intent behind it – which could be peaceful, violent, revolutionary, stifling or joyful. Marching can take on so many different forms, but it's always a group activity for a group cause that represents those intentions or feelings by a show of numbers together in one direction. Oftentimes it's not about getting from point A to point B, it's simply the act of marching and of being together that expresses the point.”

Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double – March

Firehouse 12 Records – FH12-04-01-035 – Recorded Dec. 10-11, 2019

Release date March 4, 2022

Tomas Fujiwara, photo by Brian Cohen

Tomas Fujiwara

Described as “a ubiquitous presence in the New York scene…an artist whose urbane writing is equal to his impressively nuanced drumming,” Brooklyn-based Tomas Fujiwara is an active player in some of the most exciting music of the current generation. He leads the bands Triple Double (with Gerald Cleaver, Mary Halvorson, Brandon Seabrook, Ralph Alessi, and Taylor Ho Bynum), 7 Poets Trio (with Patricia Brennan and Tomeka Reid), and Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up (with Jonathan Finlayson, Brian Settles, Halvorson, and Michael Formanek); has a collaborative duo with Bynum; is a member of the collective trio Thumbscrew (with Halvorson and Formanek); and engages in a diversity of creative work with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Joe Morris, Bynum, Nicole Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Reid, Amir ElSaffar, Benoit Delbecq, and many others. In 2021, he won the DownBeat Critics Poll for Rising Star Drummer, and premiered two suites of new music as part of his Roulette Residency: “You Don’t Have to Try” (with Meshell Ndegeocello) and “Shizuko” (with Bynum, Reid, Rafiq Bhatia, and Davi Vieira). “Drummer Tomas Fujiwara works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting. His style is forward-driving but rarely blunt or aggressive, and never random. He has a way of spreading out the center of a pulse while setting up a rigorous scaffolding of restraint…A conception of the drum set as a full-canvas instrument, almost orchestral in its scope.” 

tomasfujiwara.com

Ben Goldberg - Everything Happens To Be. (BAG Production Records 2021)

 

The echoes of traditional jazz bounce off the walls of Ben Goldberg’s music. The music is warped and strange, as if buckling beneath the strain of being compressed to fit the length of the clarinetist’s latest recording. For this session, Goldberg collaborates with musicians who have a proven track record with that kind of approach. Guitarist Mary Halvorson, tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara traverse time and distance, recalling the sound of New Orleans one hundred years ago as they offer a vision of what it could become a hundred years from now.

1. What About 05:41

2. 21 06:14

3. Fred Hampton 04:48

4. Everything Happens To Be. 07:04

5. Cold Weather 06:23

6. Chorale Type 09:53

7. Tomas Plays the Drums 05:51

8. Long Last Moment 05:10

9. To-Ron-To 05:32

10. Abide With Me 01:10

Mary Halvorson - electric guitar

Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone

Michael Formanek - bass

Tomas Fujiwara - drums

Ben Goldberg - clarinets

All compositions by Ben Goldberg, except "Abide With Me," by William Monk (by way of Thelonious Monk).

Recorded June 2018 at Firehouse 12 Studio, New Haven

Nick Lloyd, engineer

Mixed January 2021 by Michael Coleman

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Thumbscrew at the Village Vanguard

Hi there!

Speaking of 'jazz' (well, we will be in a moment), we'd like to take a moment and make sure that everyone on this list, especially folks in the New York City area, are aware of / are reminded about THUMBSCREW's residency at the legendary and legendarily great sounding Village Vanguard next week : July 17-22!

Mary Halvorson (guitar)

Michael Formanek (bass)

Tomas Fujiwara (drums)

Mary Halvorson - Code Girl (FIREHOUSE 12 RECORDS 2018)

Code Girl is the latest project of guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson, and her first project for which she has composed both lyrics and music. The band has already been described as “...a bold experiment in song form” by The New York Times. Deftly interpreted by Amirtha Kidambi (vocals), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Michael Formanek (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), the music synthesizes influences of jazz, folk and improvisation to create an original take on songwriting. The debut album will be released on Firehouse 12 Records March 2018.

“Halvorson has set her sights high with Code Girl. It is the first time she has worked with a vocalist, not to mention writing lyrics for another member of an ensemble. The group exhibited some characteristic features of a Halvorson ensemble—tight associations between members where each musician develops their voice, responds directly and confidently with each other, connects at multiple points simultaneously. Meanwhile, the compositions also brew a rare cohesion that never feels forced and draws each member toward their greatest potential. Trumpet and voice mixed quite profoundly, at times, and the vocal styling of Kidambi—drawing from a broad range of influences ranging from the Carnatic tradition to old blues—created a haunting and emotionally rich panorama of colors, shapes, and images that made for both tangible and abstract consumption by the attentive audience.”

Mary Halvorson, guitar

Amirtha Kidambi, vocals

Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet

Michael Formanek, bass

Tomas Fujiwara, drums

Tomas Fujiwara - Triple Double (FIREHOUSE 12 RECORDS 2017)

Bandleader, composer, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara possesses a musical dexterity that could go unnoticed if not for its ripple effect. He has brought his rhythmic and compositional imprint to a wide variety of settings – as a member of the collective trio Thumbscrew (with Mary Halvorson and Michael Formanek), in a long-standing duo with Taylor Ho Bynum, and as a supporting member in groups led by Bynum, Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Tomeka Reid, Amir ElSaffar, and Nicole Mitchell. While these collaborative efforts could define and sustain him, a more ambitious musical intelligence emerges on closer inspection.

1. Diving For Quarters 11:00

2. Blueberry Eyes 05:58

3. Hurry Home B/G 03:32

4. Pocket Pass 02:46

5. For Alan 08:00

6. Love And Protest 07:43

7. Decisive Shadow 05:52

8. Hurry Home M/T 03:21

9. Toasting The Mart 04:02

10. To Hours 06:20

Tomas Fujiwara – drums

Gerald Cleaver - drums

Mary Halvorson – guitar

Brandon Seabrook - guitar

Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet

Ralph Alessi - trumpet

Mary Halvorson Quartet – Paimon: Book of Angels Volume 32 (2017)

After thirteen years and thirty-two CDs Zorn's expansive Book of Angels project is now complete! This final installment presents the last ten unrecorded compositions from Masada Book Two and the variety, drama and lyricism is just as strong as the very first volume. Mary Halvorson, a long time Masada fan and one of the most acclaimed guitarists of her generation leads a dynamic quartet featuring Miles Okazaki, Drew Gress and Tomas Fujiwara. The music is intense, wild and incredibly varied, a beautiful and fitting conclusion to this historic Masada series, hailed as one of Zorn's best!

1 Chaskiel

2 Beniel

3 Ruhiel

4 Dahariel

5 Yeqon

6 Uzza

7 Verchiel

8 Jesodoth

9 Phul

10 Rachmiah

Drew Gress: Bass

Tomas Fujiwara: Drums

Mary Halvorson: Guitar

Miles Okazaki: Guitar

Illegal Crowns - Illegal Crowns (ROGUEART 2016)

We treasure the long-time collaborators who share the same commitment to the creative journey, and we thrill at meeting new partners who converse with the same hybridized and willfully corrupted musical vocabulary. A cooperative project like Illegal Crowns celebrates all of the above.

Illegal Crowns: a group both old and new, music accessible and experimental, a name revolutionary and royal. Four individuals and one ensemble, in the kind of harmony that needs no resolution. Taylor Ho Bynum, excerpt from the liner notes

01. Colle & Acrylique 6:21

02. Thoby’s Sister 6:29

03. Illegal Crown 9:03

04. Holograms 4:09

05. Solar Mail 7:18

06. Wry Tulips 14:44

Mary Halvorson: guitar

Tomas Fujiwara: drums

Benoît Delbecq: piano, prepared piano

Taylor Ho Bynum: cornet, flugelhorn