Two New Natsuki Tamura Albums

Cover of Natsuki Tamura’s latest solo album

Over the last two months Japanese trumpeter Natsuki Tamura has released two new albums. One of these is his latest solo album, entitled Iyaho. The other is entitled simply 5 Trumpets. Due to the usual neglect on the part of Amazon.com, both of the above hyperlinks are to Bandcamp Web pages. In both cases the content is only in digital form, either through streaming or download.

Unless I am mistaken, Tamura’s last solo album was Summer Tree, whose four tracks were all products of overlaying multiple performances. On Iyaho Tamura adds both vocalization and percussion to his mixing of other tracks of his trumpet work. (One hears the word “iyaho” uttered early in the first of the album’s five tracks.) The percussion work tends to shy away from the instruments of a drum kit or a symphonic orchestra. Instead, he works with woks, pots, and other cooking implements, given the music a “home-grown” rhetoric. Of course he is far from the first musician to go to the kitchen for his percussion resources; but in his engagement of those resources into the setting of his other approaches to making music, the results are decidedly unique and often witty. I have to say that, over the course of my own listening experiences, I found that I had occasionally encountered fragments evocative of both Lou Harrison and Olivier Messiaen. However, those are personal listening habits that might not be shared with other listeners!

Five Trumpets, on the other hand, is true to its title. Tamura is joined by Ali Morimoto, Masafumi Ezaki, Nobuki Yamamoto, and Rabito Arimoto for about 40 minutes of exploratory improvisation. Working with such resources, Tamura no longer needs to worry about mixing multiple tracks. Basically, all five trumpeters gathered together in a recording studio, turned on the recording apparatus, and jammed together until they all agreed that they had come to closure. The result is an album that is likely to please anyone interested in adventurous trumpet work.