Fujii’s September Birthday Release with Spence

Back cover of intelsat showing Satoko Fujii and Alister Spence in performance (courtesy of Brathwaite & Katz Communications)

This has been a busy month, and one of the consequences is that I have not been as quick to listen to the September release in Satoko Fujii’s “Kanreki Cycle,” the series of twelve new albums, one for every month of the calendar year, that she has been releasing to honor her 60th birthday. The title of the new release is intelsat, and it marks her first album of a duo performance with Australian Alister Spence. Note the hyperlink to Amazon.com. By my records this is the first to appear since the Kanreki Cycle began. It is for an MP3 download, but it is nice to see Amazon.com take any sort of notice for a change!

The title is a somewhat odd one. The use of lower case letters is deliberate, since Intelsat (as it is currently spelled and capitalized) is a communications satellite services provider, one of the leading pioneers is moving space technology into the private sector. Each of the tracks on the album is named for a different moon of Saturn; and the exploration of Saturn by spacecraft has been a major NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) mission since Pioneer 11 made the first flyby. Saturn has at least 62 moons, 53 of which have been given names; and the track titles show a preference for some of the more obscure of those moons.

On the musical side (which is where the real interest lies) Spence’s instrument is a Fender Rhodes electric piano. However, he does not limit performance to the keyboard. Just as Fujii can lift the lid of her grand piano to play the instrument from the interior or to prepare it by inserting physical objects either between or on top of the strings (see the image above), Spence can remove the cover of his instrument. He does this, in his words, “to see what noises I can make, with the aid of some electronic effects pedals, that were not necessarily linked to activating the keyboard mechanism. For me the setup presents me with a way in which I can explore sound without necessarily revealing myself as a keyboard player.”

Fujii first encountered Spence in 2007 when she and her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, were touring Australia. Fujii and Tamura asked Spence and his trio to join them when they were playing in Sydney, and the five players subsequently shared a double bill at the Tokyo International Jazz Festival. There followed a series of duo concerts given by Fujii and Spence, and all of the material on intelsat was recorded at such a concert given in 2017.

That concert consisted of a single uninterrupted improvisation, meaning that the seven tracks on the album are all excerpts, extracted as a result of some attempt to “parse” the session in its entirety. How much “logic” accounts for that “parsing” is left for the listener to decide. The second track is disproportionately larger than the other six, clocking in at over 22 minutes; and I have to confess that my own propensity for segmentation kicked in through efforts to “parse” that single track!

More interesting, however, are the sounds themselves. I would suggest that there is a clear objective on the part of both Fujii and Spence to give the impression that this is a performance of a single instrument capable of a prodigious variety of ways in which to produce sounds. Having said that, I have to confess that familiarity with extended techniques for playing a grand piano (including preparation) tended to facilitate my own abilities to sort out the respective contributions of Fujii and Spence. However, that is just the theorist in my trying to get your attention! As a listener I can still be content with just listening to the ongoing flow of a diversity of sonorities, wishing I had been there for the concert gig that served as the “source” for this album.