New Album of Live Performance by Kaze Quartet

Cover of the album being discussed

One week from today, Circum-Disc and Libra Records will release the latest album of the Kaze quartet. The members of this quartet are trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and his wife, Satoko Fujii, joined by Christian Pruvost on trumpet and flugelhorn and drummer Peter Orins. The title of the album is Unwritten, and it documents a live performance that took place in Lille (in France) on May 14, 2023. That would be a little over a month after the last Kaze release of the album Crustal Movement, which, while emerging from pandemic conditions, was created by exchanging and mixing audio files. As of this writing, the album is available for pre-order through a Presto Music Web page.

Bringing all four members together in the same place at the same time allowed for a more extended approach to the group’s adventurous approach to improvisation. (All four members are credited with providing the music on the new album’s three tracks.) The first track “Thirteen Years” accounts for over 35 minutes of free improvisation, constituting a journey through solo takes and the different combinations of the quartet members. By virtue of extended pauses, the piece is episodic in nature. It is followed by two shorter tracks, “We Waited” (a little over a quarter of an hour) and “Evolving” (less than ten minutes). (These two tracks are actually a splitting of a second extended improvisation.) There are also episodes in which Tamura extends his trumpet work with vocalization (which occasionally seems to mimic the sound of the trumpet).

Readers may recall that Crustal Movement was created through the use of “blueprints,” which provided a framework for the exchanging and mixing processes. No blueprints were involved in the Unwritten performance. As Fujii put it, “We just played without any discussion.” In that context it is more than a little impressive that such spontaneity could lead to such a wide diversity of sonorous experiences over such a generous interval of time. I found myself wishing that I could have been at la malterje (the name of the venue) to experience the performance itself.

Nevertheless, like so many of Fujii’s albums, the listening experience itself emerges as an adventure, which is likely to tweak new aspects of imagination with each encounter.