For bassist and composer Fumi Tomita, ghosts, monsters, and supernatural beings are not simply creatures from another world. They are vessels for memory, identity, grief, and transformation.
On Yokai! Songs of the Japanese Supernatural, due October 16 via Origin Records, Tomita brings those ideas into a vivid jazz setting, creating music inspired by the yokai of Japanese folklore — shapeshifting spirits, demons, monsters, tricksters, and other supernatural figures that have populated Japanese culture for centuries.
Leading a quartet with saxophonist and flutist Carl Clements, guitarist Jason Ennis, and drummer Gary Fieldman, Tomita translates these fantastical beings into sound. The resulting music is often dark and mysterious, but never confined to a single mood. It slithers, lurches, shimmers, dances, and occasionally reveals unexpected beauty.
The project began during a period of personal upheaval. Tomita, who was born in New York to a Japanese father and Chinese-American mother, was processing grief and a spiritual crisis following his father's death in 2023. Around that time, his wife gave him a book of Japanese woodblock images depicting supernatural figures.
The images sparked something.
“I was looking to record spiritual music in a way that suited the way I play,” Tomita recalls. “I felt like I had seen some of those demons and monsters on masks and logos in Japan and knew that it was a perfect fit.”
That connection between visual imagery and sound becomes central to Yokai!. Each composition seems to inhabit the personality of its namesake rather than merely illustrating it.
“Daija (Monster Snake),” the album's opening track, winds unpredictably through melodic, rhythmic, and formal ideas, constantly changing shape like its serpentine subject. “Betobeto-san” begins with a slow, slithering melody before becoming increasingly awkward and chaotic. “Raiju (Thunder Beast)” shifts its rhythmic trajectory in sudden bursts, evoking the lightning balls associated with the creature.
The music feels slightly out of alignment with the ordinary world — appropriately strange for an album about beings that exist somewhere between the familiar and the unknown.
But Yokai! is not an exercise in darkness alone.
Some of its most compelling moments emerge when the quartet discovers beauty inside the supernatural. “Kitsune (The Fox)” is among the album's most graceful pieces, with Tomita delivering a long, low-toned bass solo that feels almost like a secret being whispered from another realm.
On “Amabiko (Sea Lad),” Clements switches to flute for an elegant melody that seems to float above Ennis' pastoral guitar textures. The album closes with “Hyakki Yagyo (A Night Parade of 100 Demons),” a playful and hypnotic finale in which Clements' soprano saxophone twists through a curious 7/4 groove.
The result is an album that manages to be unsettling and welcoming at the same time. Tomita and his collaborators create a world that initially feels unfamiliar, then gradually give the listener enough rhythmic and melodic footholds to explore it.
That sense of exploration has been a defining feature of Tomita's career.
Born November 26, 1971, in New York City, Tomita initially found his way into music through rock. But it wasn't conventional rock that captured his attention. He gravitated toward progressive rock of the late 1970s and early '80s, which led naturally toward jazz fusion and eventually toward experimentation with piano, guitar, and bass.
Bass ultimately became his instrument, carrying him into the jazz performance program at McGill University in Montreal. After working as a musician in Montreal and spending a year in Portland, Oregon, he returned to New York in 2000 to pursue a master's degree at Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jay Anderson and Larry Ridley.
The program connected him to the city's jazz community, and he began working with musicians including Joey Baron, Vincent Herring, Jeremy Pelt, and Art Hirahara. At the same time, Tomita continued his academic work, studying ethnomusicology at Hunter College and jazz and contemporary media at the Eastman School of Music, where he met tenor saxophonist Dave Detweiler.
He eventually joined the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's jazz program as a tenure-track faculty member, adding teaching and scholarship to his work as a performer and composer.
Tomita's recording career began with Untold and Impromptu, both released in 2011 after being recorded earlier in the decade. In 2019, he took a more direct look at his Asian American identity with The Elephant Vanishes: Jazz Interpretations of the Short Stories of Haruki Murakami.
That project established a pattern that continues on Yokai!: using jazz as a way to investigate literature, culture, memory, and heritage without treating those subjects as static academic concepts.
If The Elephant Vanishes explored Tomita's identity through the fiction of Haruki Murakami, Yokai! looks toward another part of his family and cultural inheritance. The supernatural figures become a new vocabulary for considering the Japanese side of his heritage — one that is simultaneously historical, personal, imaginative, and alive.
The album also follows Tomita's Celebration of Bird, which immersed itself in the tradition of American jazz. Yokai! operates as something of a companion piece, turning his attention across the Pacific and toward the stories and imagery that shaped his father's culture.
That movement between traditions is characteristic of Tomita's approach. He does not treat heritage as something that must be preserved untouched. Instead, he places it in conversation with the improvisational language he has spent decades developing.
The supernatural is particularly well suited to that approach because yokai themselves are difficult to pin down. They transform. They inhabit contradictions. They can be frightening, mischievous, beautiful, grotesque, or all of those things at once.
Tomita's music mirrors that instability.
A melody can suddenly fracture. A groove can stumble. A familiar harmonic idea can take an unexpected turn. A beautiful passage can acquire a darker shadow. The compositions behave less like fixed portraits than living characters capable of changing shape.
That quality also makes the album particularly suited to Tomita's planned audiovisual presentations. Beginning shortly after the album's release, he will present the Yokai! material in performances that place the music in a broader visual and cultural context.
The series begins October 17 at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut, followed by performances at Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn on October 18 and at UMass Amherst on October 21. Additional appearances are scheduled at the Springfield Museum, the Van Dyck Music Club in Schenectady, CNY Jazz Central in Syracuse, and the Bop Shop in Rochester. A performance and lecture at Stanford University is planned for February 28, 2027, in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the university's Center for Buddhist Studies.
Taken together, the album and performances suggest that Tomita is interested in more than simply telling ghost stories through jazz. He is exploring what happens when old images are allowed to become new sounds — and when personal grief creates an opening for cultural memory to return in unexpected forms.
On Yokai!, the supernatural is never entirely separate from the human. The monsters may slither, vanish, transform, and parade through the night, but underneath them are familiar emotions: fear, curiosity, loss, beauty, playfulness, longing, and the desire to understand what cannot quite be explained.
Tomita gives those emotions a musical language that is as fluid as the creatures that inspired it.
The ghosts don't simply haunt these songs.
They move through them.
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