The group chemistry is magical on pianist-composer Satoko
Fujii's Aspiration, featuring an all-star quartet with trumpeters Wadada Leo
Smith and Natsuki Tamura, and laptop player Ikue Mori. The nearly telepathic
link among them takes the music into places where it grows ever deeper and more
intuitive. Each track on the album is so vividly alive in the moment and with a
character so distinct that it seems to become an animate thing independent of
its creators. The artists are almost subservient to the music rather than the
other way around. The album will be released September 8, 2017, via Fujii's
Libra Records.
It's little wonder the album is so subtle and intimate,
given the artists involved. Although this is the first time they have worked
together as a group, there are ties among them that contribute to the music's
beauty and coherence. Smith and Mori displayed an uncommonly close rapport
during their duets on Smith's Luminous Axis (Tzadik). "I knew Wadada and
Ikue had worked together before," Fujii says, "but that's not why I
asked Ikue to join us. Natsuki and I had played with Ikue before on several
occasions and we had a great time. When I started composing for the project
with Wadada, I heard Ikue's sound in my ears." Of course, Fujii and Tamura
share an intimate bond developed over several decades of working together and
especially in their duo music, which they've recorded five times since 1997.
Once they came together in the studio, creating the music
was easy, Fujii says. "I could feel a kind of calm confidence when we were
together. I knew that we were going to make good music."
Fujii's intuition about the quality of the music proved
correct. They venture into the mysteries and potentials - and the risks - of
the quartet with fearless openness and discipline. On each track, every aspect
of sound production is in spontaneous flux-rhythm, melody, dynamics, texture,
density, silence. There is no telling where the music may lead. On
"Intent," the unfixed quality keeps the listener on edge in
anticipation of where the music will flow next. As the members of the band move
in and out of the music, each sonic event blossoms with vibrant immediacy, and
fades away as the music evolves. "Floating" opens with
extraordinarily graceful piano from Fujii while Mori orchestrates textures and
rhythms in parallel to her. About five minutes in, Smith makes a dramatic
entrance and a three-way conversation ensues before Tamura brings the piece to
a quiet ending. It's one of the most elusive and obliquely lyrical tracks on
the disc, and there isn't a note out of place. Tamura's "Stillness"
is a piece of complementary contrasts with a contemplative start that suddenly
erupts into roiling energy and subsides. Again, there's a sense of
inevitability that feels organic. Even the unaccompanied solos that crop up
throughout the performances-for instance, Tamura's sculptural opening to
"Evolution," or Fujii's solo later in that same piece-are shaped to
function within the context of the composition.
Fujii, Smith, Tamura, and Mori gathered without preconceived
notions about what must happen as they play. Instead they discovered together
what the music could do, and nurtured it to its fullest expression. In the end,
Aspiration is about more than music-it is about sharing and working together,
about finding something beautiful and making it more so, and about the
spiritual bonds that unite us all.
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. She 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." Her ultimate goal: "I would love to make music that no one has
heard before."
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."
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, trumpeter,
multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser Wadada Leo Smith is one of the
most boldly original and influential artists of our time. Transcending the
bounds of genre or idiom, he distinctly defines his music, tirelessly inventive
in both sound and approach, as "Creative Music." For the last five
decades, Smith has been a member of the legendary AACM collective, pivotal in
its wide-open perspectives on music and art in general. He has carried those
all-embracing concepts into his own work, expanding upon them in myriad ways.
Smith received the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary
doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In
addition, he received the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career
Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience." In 2017 Smith
topped three categories in DownBeat Magazine's 65th Annual Critics Poll: Jazz
Artist, Trumpet and Jazz Album (for America's National Parks on
Cuneiform.) Smith was also honored by
the Jazz Journalists Association as their 2017 Musician of the Year as well as
the 2017 Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland,
Mississippi, Smith's early musical life began at age thirteen when he became
involved with the Delta blues and jazz traditions performing with his stepfather,
bluesman Alex Wallace. He received his formal musical education from the U.S.
Military band program (1963), the Sherwood School of Music (1967-69), and
Wesleyan University (1975-76).
Smith has released more than 50 albums as a leader. His 2016
recording, America's National Parks, a six-movement suite inspired by the
scenic splendor, historic legacy, and political controversies of the country's
public landscapes, earned a place on numerous best of the year lists including
the New York Times, NPR Music and many others. Smith's landmark 2012 civil
rights opus Ten Freedom Summers was called "A staggering achievement
[that] merits comparison to Coltrane's A Love Supreme in sobriety and
reach."
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.
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