Pianist Satoko Fujii is one of those rare composers whose work shows up in both the “classical” and “jazz” categories in the classification of my recordings. Ironically, I first became aware of her not through a recording but through a performance she gave in February of 2015 of improvisations with trumpeter Kappa Maki in a program at the Center for New Music (C4NM) curated by Larry Ochs entitled Existence: Quartet Music for Improvisers. Fujii and Maki had come to San Francisco for the New Frequencies Fest at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, after which they visited C4NM to perform with percussionist Jordan Glenn and Bruce Ackley on a diversity of single-reed instruments.
A little over two years later, I downloaded my first Fujii album, entitled June. This also involved a quartet with Fujii performing with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. In this case, however, the other two performers were French, rather than American: trumpeter, Christian Pruvost, and drummer Peter Orins. The quartet was called Kaze; and the album included two additional French performers, Sophie Agnel on a second piano, and Didier Lasserre serving as a second drummer. The expanded group called itself Trouble Kaze.
Over the course of about four years, Fujii albums have become a significant sector in my jazz collection. Every now and then, however, a release would arise, which presented solo piano music that did not seem to “fit” the jazz category particularly comfortably. Indeed, one of those albums involved another pianist performing Fujii compositions: Diary 2005–2015: Yuko Yamaoka plays the music of Satoko Fujii, which was the November installment in Fujii’s “Kanreki Cycle” of month-by-month releases to honor the year of her 60th birthday (2018). This was followed, in June of 2019, by Stone, Fujii’s own solo performance of fifteen short piano pieces. Each of these pieces struck me has having less to do with jazz and more to do with the affordances of the piano itself, which I described as “the latest disciplined investigation of how a piano can be ‘more than a piano.’”
Those investigations have continued in Fujii’s latest solo album, entitled simply Piano Music. The album was released this past April on Libra Records, which is Fujii’s “home” label; and that release has a Bandcamp Web page. It is available only for streaming and download, and the price is given in Japanese yen. My understanding is that there will be a United States release this coming Friday, which may lead to a change on the Bandcamp Web site that will provide a price in United States dollars.
While Stone served as a document of experimentation through a series of performances, each involving different approaches to execution, Piano Music consists of only two longer compositions, the first, “Shiroku,” about nineteen minutes in duration and the second, “Fuwarito,” lasting 27 minutes. Both of these are “collage” compositions, created through the inventive editing of pre-recorded snippets. In other words Fujii chose to explore synthesis as an alternative for performance. As she put it:
I thought I could put together small parts to make a big work, fitting the pieces together the way I wanted to. I could make music like building with Legos. This may not be a new thing for many creators, but for me it was new because I am a very analog piano player.
Indeed, I know from my experience that this is not “a new thing.” My interest in musique concrète and tape music goes all the way back to my student days, when I first captured computer-generated sounds based on frequency-modulation synthesis and took the tapes to the campus radio station to experiment with different approaches to editing and superposition. (These days I am more content to be just part of the audience for the San Francisco Tape Music Festival!) However, both of the tracks on Fujii’s new album are definitely “new things” because they are informed by her rich background as a performer, which is decidedly different from the “design-based” approaches that one encounters in most of the tape music repertoire. As an attentive listener, I would never confuse either of the Piano Music tracks with anything I had previously encountered in the tape music genre; and I was delighted with the originality of Fujii’s techniques and the results that they yielded.
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