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
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.
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.”
