Tamura and Fujii Release Tenth Duo Album

Satoko Fuji performing with Natsuki Tamura (photograph by Ludwig Sik, courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications)

Those following this site for some time probably know that I do my best to keep up with writing about albums of performances by jazz pianist Satoko Fujii. She was one of the first visiting artists to perform at the Center for New Music after it opened at 55 Taylor Street in the fall of 2012. According to my archives, her most recent visit took place early in 2017, when she led a program entitled Existence: Quartet Music for Improvisers. That was one of many occasions in concert and on recordings that she performed with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura.

The most recent of those duo albums was released a week ago and is now available for purchase through a Bandcamp Web page. The title of the album is Ki. It consists of eight tracks, the longest of which is ten minutes with the shortest eight seconds shy of five minutes. The final track (listed as “bonus”), “Dan’s Oceanside Listening Post,” was composed by Fujii. The other seven were Tamura originals. All of the tracks were recorded on July 15 in Tokyo. They were then mixed and mastered by Mike Marciano in New York later in the month.

For the most part, the performance proceeds at a leisurely pace. Readers may recall that, at the beginning of this week, I invoked the adjective “meditative” to apply to an arrangement of a Turkish folk song for solo guitar. The approach that Tamura and Fujii take to the eight tracks of Ki is even more meditative. Taken as a whole, the album amounts to a “gallery of dispositions,” each of which presents its own take on stillness. In many ways, my approach to listening reflects back on my earliest encounters of performances by John Cage, either as a soloist or with one or two of his colleagues.

Cage was always interested in how music was made on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was not surprised to learn from an interview that Fujii gave in July of 2019 that she was aware of his “nonstandard” approaches to making music. Since Cage died in 1992, my guess is that she never crossed his path and may not have been aware of that path during his lifetime. To be fair, no one would confuse any of the tracks on Ki with the music Cage and his colleagues made. Nevertheless, every time I listen to a new Fujii album, I always seem to reflect on how my own experiences with Cage broadened my interests.

Those interests now receive, with great pleasure, the listening experiences associated with both duo and solo performances by Tamura and Fujii.