I would love to make music that no one has heard before.
Satoko Fujii
Ah wouldn’t we all. But how many of us get the chance -- much less the Herculean discipline -- to do it?
Here at da Beast, we like to throw around metaphors as carelessly as the next blog—but even this might be stretching it for us: think of the Satoko Fujii Four as The Band of nü jazz. Wait, wait for it...Here are a group of musicians whose diversity of ranks produces a diversity of sounds: there’s the Japanese husband–and-wife team of pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, the West Coast chamber music/avant-jazz elder statesman, bassist Mark Dresser, and the maniacally divergent young New York drummer Jim Black. Their combined assault of all these ingredients—from willowy caresses of Asian or European folk music and intricately latticed classical etudes to the chest-seizing peals of avant-noise—are, wrote Jazz Central Station’s Drew Wheeler, “a potent mix of passion and calculated madness.” “They are the masters of paradox,” added Music and More's Tim Niland. “Managing contradictory feelings and statements, mixing drama with fun, calm and nervousness, composition and improvisation, but all within the same very coherent idiom.”
Fujii herself has been invariably compared to Toshiko Akiyoshi, not in the least because (thanks, in part, to lazy journalists) both are Japanese pianists who are Berklee School of Music alums and had to endure painful breaks with tradition. In the former’s case, it was Western male-dominated jazz; in the latter, her parents.
But where Akiyoshi was a devotee of Bud Powell, Fujii’s technique derives more from the tradition of Bill Evans, Abdullah Ibrahim, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston and Paul Bley, whom Fujii says "revolutionized" her playing when he was her teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music. “I got a big influence from him, not only musically, but also as a way to think,” she told Jazz Weekly in 1998. “In our lessons, we spent a lot of time talking, not playing the piano. But I could play much better after spending two hours talking with him than practicing for eight hours. As a musician, of course, he is great. When he sits in front of a piano before he starts to play, I can see and feel his music come from his inside with his concentration. All great musician have that kind of power.” (Bley, was featured on her 1996 debut Something About Water.)
But Fujii’s preeminent—and most unforgiving—teacher was herself. Although she began piano lessons at age four and had classical training until age twenty, she had an unsettling realization. “When I studied classical, I only played written music,” she told writer Sam Prestianni in 1998. “When I was very little, right after I began taking piano lessons, I enjoyed improvising without any music paper. But after 16 years of classical training, I had big trouble trying to improvise. I was very shocked when I found that I couldn't play anything without music paper. I was just like well trained dogs that can do only the things that they are told.”
Interview with Satoko Fujii
It was an epiphany that led Fujii to embark on an almost Sonny Rollins-type musical quest, demolishing everything she had learned in order to build it back up again. Her spiritual mentor was a man who had abandoned classical music for the liberation of jazz. “I started to study with Mr. Koji Taku, who was classical piano department chairman at Tokyo Art and Music College,” she told All About Jazz’s Wayne Zade. “He then quit his work as chairman and began to play jazz in some local clubs and cabarets when he was over 60 years old. It was not the usual thing that people in Japan do. But he didn't care about his status in society-he just followed his feeling. I was so impressed with the example of his life. I never went on to the conservatory because of his influence. I began to listen to jazz because I wanted to see why he was so into it. I listened to a jazz program on FM radio, and was knocked out by A Love Supreme. That was a great experience for me, to be so moved by something that I could not understand.”
The 18-year old Fujii abandoned piano—and instruments as a whole. “I wanted to try making music like in the primitive age," she told Speak magazine. "I was very curious about the origins of music, so I stopped playing piano and started a band where every member sang and clapped hands. We had sessions once a week in the park or in dance studios in Tokyo. I really wanted to know what music is for humans? And why do we play music? I had big fun doing that... but I couldn't find my answer.”
After a year, she returned to the piano with an equal desire to dismantle and pervert it from all angles, both musically and physically. Where children used to run away from home to join the circus, Fujii ran away to join Jazz, leaving the comforting environs of academia (as well as her parents’ expectations) and a potentially lucrative concert-hall career and supporting herself (like her teacher Taku) with working faceless hotel lounges and cabarets in Tokyo, playing the music of Count Basie and Duke Ellington house pianist with some big bands in cabarets in Tokyo to collecting newspaper scraps from the street for recycling.
Satoko Fuji & Natsuki Tamura live duo at Cafe Metropol, Los Angeles (9/08/07)
In 1984, when she was playing one of her cabarets, she met her future husband, the firery avant-garde trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, whose playing style might be desctibed as "the Nels Cline of the trumpet." “Our means of expression are very different,but our musical values are the same.” she said in a Jazz Review interview. "Natsuki and I both think we can derive inspiration from anything when we want to make music. For example, I play inside the piano as well as on the keyboard. Texture, color, timbre, pulse, rhythm, and harmony are equally picked up as elements forming the whole.” In 1996, the same year both had graduated from the NEC, Fujii and Tamura released their duo debut How Many?, of which Chris Kelsey of Cadence's Chris Kelsey wrote: "Together Tamura and Fujii construct perfect little structures; their collaboration is balanced, astute, and very musical."
This eeriely symbiotic parntership extended to their live shows: “Beginning and ending most pieces with a unison section, the two artists remained close and tightly-knit,” wrote AAJ's Jim Santella of a September 2007 Fujii/Tamura duo show. “As spouses and as long- time friends and musical partners, they’ve developed a genuine kinship that extends into their performance as natural as breathing. Together, they deliver finely-honed statements that excite the senses, while their soloing goes far beyond.”
“Hizumi” from Kitsune-bi (Tzadik/New Japan, 1999) with Satoko Fujii, Mark Dresser & Jim Black (Recorded NYC, May 7 & November 3, 1998)
Since then, Fujii's prolific output and restless range are spread like one epic quest-narrative across forty CDs as leader or co-leader with around 15 different ensembles -- but arguably the most enduring (and evolving) one is her piano trio with Dresser and Black. “I used to live in New York City,” Fujii told Jason Crane in 2008. “After I graduated from the New England Conservatory in Boston, I moved to New York City in 1996. My husband, Natsuki, and I tried to go many jazz clubs to listen to music. I heard many interesting things in the city, and I especially liked Mark Dresser and Jim Black. They didn't play in the same band, but I had a feeling that I could get together with them to make a band.” Their debut, 1997's Looking Out of the Window, earned wide acclaim and was chosen as a Top 10 CD of the Year by both Jazziz and Coda.
The trio's subsequent releases have all earned places in critics’ year-end Top 10 lists. "Fujii, Dresser, and Black are a real unit where their individual voices can be clearly heard while they continuously work together to make a unified whole," wrote Bud Kopman of 2008's Trace a River. "The result is music that is completely alive, unpredictable and yet accessible due to the logic of its structure and development.”
Tamura finally joined the trio for Live in Japan 2004. Recorded at Tokyo's Egg Farm, the CD was was prescribed by the Village Voice as "a good example of how instruments can operate outside their prescribed roles… The free-jazz interplay finds the leader/pianist pushing like a drummer, bassist Mark Dresser thumping out subtexted melodies, and percussionist Jim Black coating the action in a silvery scrim. As for trumpeter Natsuki Tamura? call him a skywriter.”
Fujii and Yamura have since relocated in Tokyo, where she says their love of weird noises still hasn't bridged a previous generation. “My parents listen to very traditional music, and they are not crazy about my stuff,” she told All About Jazz. “My mother once said to Natsuki, ‘How come you play like choking pigs? You can make beautiful sounds with your horn, so why do you play like that?' We really like that expression. It sounds great. Choking pigs.“
Natsuki Tamura/Satoko Fujii homepage
Satoko Fujii profile (Speak Magazine, April/May 1998)
“The Musical Expression of Herself”: An Interview with Satoko Fujii (Jazz Review)
“Satoko Fujii: Orchestras East and West” (AAJ, January 2001)
“Satoko Fujii: Four and More” (AAJ, 10/20/08):
“A Fireside Chat with Satoko Fujii” (Jazz Weekly, 1998)
Natsuki Tamura homepage
Satoko Fujii/Natsuki Tamura reviews from AAJ
Mark Dresser homepage
“Mark Dresser and the new Avant Garde” (Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Eagle, 4/14/00)
Interview with Mark Dresser (Sébastien Moig, Jazzosphere)
Jim Black homepage
77 Boadrum Jim Black profile (video)
Listen to The BBC (Tim Berne, Jim Black, Nels Cline)
Brooklyn Vegan live review of the BBC at the Stone, NYC (July 2009)
Dave Liebman, Ronan Guilfoyle, Jim Black live at the 55 Bar, NYC
Carlos Bica, Jim Black & Frank Möbys live at Bimhuis, Amsterdam (2007)
Ellery Eskelin, Andrea Parkins & Jim Black, trailer for band DVD
UCSD faculty member and trumpet virtuoso Edwin Harkins joins special guest, contrabassist Mark Dresser, in a performance of their co-written composition House of Mirrors. Series: "New Music from UCSD" (5/2002)
Roswell Rudd and Mark Dresser live at SUNY Purchase (2005)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR:
The Satoko Fujii Four will play the Angel City Jazz Festival at 5:15pm on Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009.
