Distributed Jamming Across Continents

A little over three weeks ago, Circum-Disc and Libra Records jointly released a rather unique album involving five musicians improvising while based in three different continents. Two of those musicians, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and his wife, pianist Satoko Fujii, contributed to the performance from their home in Kobe City. This past July, when they were still dealing with constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they recorded a performance by their Sleeping Cat trio by exchanging and mixing audio files with the third member of their trio, trombonist Yasuko Kaneko, who was living in Okayama City.

Cover of the album being discussed

In their new album, entitled Crustal Movement, Tamura and Fujii perform as members of the cooperative quartet Kaze. The other two members of the quartet are drummer Peter Orins and Christian Pruvost alternating between trumpet and flugelhorn. They were based in Lille (in the northern part of France near the border with Belgium). Once again, the performance emerged from processes of exchanging and mixing audio files. In addition the quartet was joined by Ikue Mori, who specializes in laptop electronics. She contributed to the performance while based in New York City.

While the six tracks on Crustal Movement are based on spontaneous improvisations, considerable planning when into preparing each track. Those plans were based on what Fujii called “blueprints,” serving as an alternative to notations on musical staff paper. As Fujii put it, “The blueprints have time durations and instrumentation and some instructions like ‘play fast’ or ‘play quietly.’” Those blueprints provided a framework for exchanging audio files and adding new content to the mix. Pruvost and Orins then exploited an additional technique when they played the files they had received as background for their own improvised performance at a concert in Lille (recording the concert itself as part of the process).

All this amounts to a generous amount of playing, recording, and listening. Nevertheless, even the most attentive listener is likely to perceive each of the six tracks on Crustal Movement as the result of a spontaneous improvisation by all five of the musicians assembled in a common venue. Mind you, this is not a matter of cultivating an illusion to “fool” that listener. Rather, it is the result of an alternative technique created through the necessity imposed by the limitations of the pandemic.

Crustal Movement is now available as either a compact disc or a digital album that can be both streamed and downloaded. The best site for all of these alternatives is one of the Kaze Web pages on the Bandcamp Web site. In the absence of a booklet, that Web page also includes an essay that provides a generous account of how this album came to be. How deep a dive will be taken into all of that content will be left to the discretion of the listener.