Even for an artist as notable for her risk taking as Satoko
Fujii, Stone (available June 7, 2019 via Libra Records,) is an audacious album.
Drawing on a unique conceptual approach to the music and her considerable array
of extended techniques, Fujii has created an utterly original and almost
mystically beautiful solo piano album unlike any in her 40-year career. After
the prodigious effort of releasing an album a month in celebration of her 60th
birthday (kanreki) last year, Fujii shows no signs of slowing down creatively.
In fact, Fujii emerged from her kanreki (60th birthday) year
with renewed energy and sense of purpose. As she explains in the album's liner
notes, "at the end of those twelve months, I had an even clearer idea of
what I wanted to do next. It was as if a fuzzy image in my mind had come into
sharp focus. I made this solo recording right around the time the fuzziness
began to clear up."
Inspired by the memory of her late grandmother, Fujii
approached the new album with a specific idea in mind. Her grandmother lost her
hearing late in life and one day, she said that since she had become deaf, she
could hear "beautiful music the likes of which I never heard before."
But she couldn't describe it. Fujii wondered, "What music will we hear for
the first time when our ears no longer can hear?" This thought guided
Fujii as she made this record.
Throughout the album, Fujii searches for something elusive,
magical-a previously unimagined (and perhaps unimaginable) music. She conceives
of the entire piano as a source of sound, not just the keyboard, but the
strings, the metal frame holding the strings, the wooden body of the
instrument. She uses everything to help her on her quest. As a result, new,
unusual sounds and cryptic melodies emerge that blend into a music that is
wholly new. On "Obsius," she gently brushes the piano wires and
plucks them percussively to create a sequence of contrasting episodes that
follow an elliptical narrative flow. "Trachyte" has an atmosphere of
otherworldly serenity as long tones overlap and pulse. The pace is slow and the
timbres almost electronic sounding. Fujii has always paid attention to tone
color, melody, and harmony, but never as she does here. On "Lava," a
long, unsettled melody played on the keyboard unexpectedly emerges and develops
out of a preceding meditation on abstract prepared-piano sound and silence.
There are surprises on every tune.
Except for "River Flow," a brief piece of stunning
melodic simplicity and beauty, and the concluding "Eternity," the
entire album is improvised. Yet each performance is tightly focused,
interlacing just a few musical elements into a close-knit, organic whole.
"I tried to use one sound from inside piano in each piece," Fujii
says. "I picked some inside-the-piano technique beforehand and improvised
with it. And then of course, things came out that I didn't plan for, and I let
them spontaneously become part of the music."
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 folk musics into an innovative style
instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific band leader and recording
artist, she celebrated her 60th birthday in 2018 by releasing one album a month
from bands old and new, from solo to large ensemble. Franz A. Matzner in All
About Jazz likened the twelve albums to "an ecosystem of independently
thriving organisms linked by the shared soil of Fujii's artistic heritage and
shaped by the forces of her creativity."
Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently
creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist
Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring
drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband
Natsuki Tamura released their sixth recording, Kisaragi, in 2017. "The
duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to
their musicianship," says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. Aspiration, a
CD by an ad hoc quartet featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was
released in 2017 to wide acclaim. "Four musicians who regularly aspire for
greater heights with each venture reach the summit together on
Aspiration," writes S. Victor Aaron in Something Else. As the leader of no
less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan (two of which, Berlin
and Tokyo, released new CDs in 2018), Fujii
has also established herself as one of the world's leading composers for
large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, "the Ellington
of free jazz."
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