Alister Spence Composes for Satoko Fujii

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications)

Now that Satoko Fujii has completed her “Kanreki Cycle,” a new year has begun with an opportunity to listen to how she works with someone else’s music. The “someone” is composer Alister Spence, currently a Lecturer in Music at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The music, however, is a product of Spence’s doctoral research, which involved practices of improvisation for ensembles on a scale larger than that of the usual jazz combos. The result was “a suite in five parts composed for, and intended for realisation by, improvising orchestra.”

The title of the suite was Imagine Meeting You Here, with each of the first four parts having titles taken from the four respective words of the suite title. The final part is then identified as “Postscript.” Spence approached both Fujii and the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) to perform the piece. Fujii responded by arranging for the premiere in February of 2016, when it was performed by three of the Satoko Fujii Orchestras in Kobe, Nagoya, and Tokyo, respectively. GIO then performed the piece in Glasgow the following November as part of GioFest IX. In 2017 the members of Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe decided to revisit the composition, and they recorded their performance at the Big Apple jazz club in Kobe on September 10 of that year.

That recording has now been released. As of this writing, it appears to be available only for digital download; and Amazon.com has created a Web page for downloading the album in its entirety. The ensemble is definitely a large one. There are five saxophonists (Ko Iwata, Yasuhisa Mizutani, Eiichiro Arasaki, Tsutomu Takei, and Keizo Nobori), four trumpeters (James Barrett, Shojiro Yokoo, Natsuki Tamura, and Rabito Arimoto), two trombones (Yusuke Imanishi and Yasuko Kaneko), and a rhythm section consisting of Takumi Seino on guitar, Fujii on piano, Hiroshi Funato on bass, and Yoshikazu Isaki on drums. Spence is the conductor.

The piece definitely establishes itself as a composition in five parts, not simply because there are pauses between the parts but also because each improvised section has its own distinctive set of ground rules. Mind you, those rules are not always obvious from the audio alone. Thus, the third part (“You”) divides the ensemble into four autonomous units, each with its own conductor; and I have to wonder whether the police whistles were distributed in order for the conductors to signal each other. My guess is that those attending the performance itself benefitted from visual cues, but the contrasts in sonorities and performance techniques are likely to assist those who can only listen in differentiating the five parts of Spence’s composition.

Nevertheless, I shall take the liberty of calling out a “ring of familiarity” that I encountered, whether the composer intended it or not. The final part (“Postscript”) begins with what can probably be called a chorale with little stretch of the imagination. To my ears that chorale seemed to be based on the “thème de Dieu” (God theme), that introduces the opening movement of Olivier Messiaen’s monumental suite Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. My guess is that this was little more than the coincidence of mind trying to relate the immediate present to at least one past experience, but I still found myself satisfied with the idea that Spence was wrapping up his undertaking with a gesture similar to one that Messiaen had used to begin his own!