2020 Concludes with Three Fujii-Tamura CDs

The last two months saw the release of three albums featuring pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and her husband, trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura. One of these, Prickly Pear Cactus, was a trio album on Fujii’s Libra Records label. The other two, Pentas and Mantle, were released by Not Two Records, based in Poland. As has been pretty consistent in the past, Amazon.com remains woefully behind the times in keeping up with Fujii’s albums, which may be purchased through Discogs using the above hyperlinks.

Pentas is the only album of duo performances. On Mantle Fujii and Tamura are joined by percussionist Ramon Lopez; and Ikue Mori brings his electronic gear to the performances on Prickly Pear Cactus. On each of the albums all of the performers contribute as composers.

In this respect Prickly Pear Cactus is particularly interesting for the breadth of inventiveness and spontaneity that Mori brings to his work with electronics. Tamura does not perform on all of the tracks; and, when he does, he tends to focus on alternative techniques yielding sonorities more compatible with Mori’s and less representative of the brass family. The album itself is very much a reflection on current pandemic conditions, since the three performers were never in the same place at the same time. Rather, the individual performers created sound files, which were shared over the Internet. The album itself then emerged from Mori’s approach to mixing and editing the accumulated content. It is a credit to all of the performers that the result still evokes a sense of spontaneous interaction.

The source material for Mantle, on the other hand, predates the pandemic. Lopez joined Fujii and Tamura for a tour of nine improvised concerts in Japan in September of 2019. The album has nine tracks with each of the performers contributing three compositions. This grew out of the plan for the tour, during which each of the players would write a new composition for the group every day. The Mantle tracks were then based on the favorite contributions of each member of the trio.

The duo album Pentas marks the latest milestone in the 23-year history during which Fujii and Tamura established themselves as one of the most celebrated duos in contemporary improvised music. Once again, the contributions to the album are equally shared, four by each of them. This is their first duo album since Kisaragi, which was released roughly a decade ago in 2010. As Fujii put it, that album amounted to an exploration of “pure, abstract sound.” The compositions for Pentas, on the other hand, tried to capture a more lyrical rhetoric while still taking an exploratory approach to spontaneous improvisation.

Ironically, my only encounter with a Fujii performance took place halfway through that decade. She visited the Center for New Music in February of 2015. She was not joined by Tamura; but she improvised with another Japanese trumpeter, Kappa Maki. It was through my fascination with her approaches to improvisation at that time that I began to focus my attention on her recordings; and, after these three recent releases, I am as fascinated as ever!