Two New Combo Albums from Satoko Fujii

Since the onset of lockdown due to pandemic conditions, jazz pianist Satoko Fujii has been impressively productive. She recorded a solo piano album entitled Hazuki in her home, after which she prepared Keshin with her husband, jazz trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. Last month she released two new combo albums through the CD Store Web page on her Libra Records Web site, each of which took its own approach to leveraging the affordances of the Internet.

Most impressive was the album Mosaic. This consists of five tracks of original Fujii compositions performed by her This Is It! trio, in which Takashi Itani adds percussion to the performances by Fujii and Tamura. What made this performance interesting is that, while Fujii and Tamura live in Kobe, Itani contributed his percussion work from his home in a Tokyo suburb 400 miles away from Kobe. What looks like a screen shot captured by Itani suggests that this performance was enabled by video conference technology, meaning that both audio and video signals were shared by all three trio members:

Ironically, once the capture had been completed, the album itself was produced by mixing and mastering performed by Mike Marciano, working with his gear on Long Island in New York.

After over one and a half years of experience with Zoom, most Internet users are now well aware that Internet connectivity is not like having a casual telephone conversation. Managing the bandwidth for both audio and video meant accepting delays in Internet connectivity as a challenge that could not be avoided. Fujii reflected on these conditions as follows:

I had to consciously concentrate more on listening. If we play in the same room, listening is as natural as breathing, I’m almost unaware that I’m doing it. But on the internet, it was not like breathing. My ears worked like listening carefully to another language; it required a little extra effort. But we found we could make music in this way.

Thus, while there is a sense of immediacy in Fujii’s interplay with Tamura’s trumpet work on the “Kumazemi” track, one can appreciate the extent to which Itani’s percussion work is providing “punctuation marks” based on his perception of the underlying rhythms coming from both piano and trumpet. Indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that each of the five tracks on this album was approached as a unique puzzle, whose solution involved inventing a unique “kit” of performance strategies.

For those that would prefer not to deal with the inventible delay due to delivery from Japan, Mosaic is also available for streaming and download through a Bandcamp Web page.

Not long after all the audio was captured by This Is It! and sent to Marciano for mastering, Fujii undertook a second project. This one involved her Futari duo with vibraphonist Taiko Saito. This duo made its recording debut at the beginning of this year with the release of an album entitled Beyond. The new album project, entitled Underground, did not involve real-time connectivity, which was probably just as well since Saito is based in Berlin. Rather, this was an act of creation enabled by exchanging files over the Internet. This allowed each performer to focus more on listening and to experiment with responses before adding to the mix and sending the results to the other performer.

When I wrote about Beyond back in January, I referred to the tracks as “exploratory improvisation.” Underground suggests that those explorations can be just as inventive through the “methodology of exchange” as they can be when they emerge through “real-time spontaneity.” Listening to Underground turned out to be as satisfying as listing to Beyond. Whether satisfaction involved an underlying “semantics of dialogue,” which did not necessarily depend on that real-time spontaneity can be left as an exercise for the listener.