Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double: March
Firehouse 12 Records
Tomas Fujiwara has made a name for himself as a terrific jazz drummer, but the idea driving his Triple Double project makes him seem something of a visionary too. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the audacity of the concept: on the one hand, it combines two trios, on the other three pairings. On its follow-up to 2017's Triple Double album, the sextet features guitarists Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook, trumpet/cornet players Ralph Alessi and Taylor Ho Bynum, and drummers Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver. Assembling a band featuring six adventurous players can't help but generate an oft-thrilling ride.
With bass conspicuously absent, it falls to another instrument to anchor and give shape to a performance. During “Life Only Gets More,” for example, a spidery guitar figure brings clarity to the composition, never more so than when the drummers solo alongside it. The omission of bass likewise engenders a looser feel in the playing, an outcome that can also be attributed to the recording approach Fujiwara adopted. In laying material down quickly, the performances are marked by spontaneity and unpredictability, which makes for exciting music.
Of course the players aren't strangers to one another. Fujiwara partners with Halvorson in Thumbscrew and played with Alessi and Seabrook in a trio that planted the seed for Triple Double. Not everyone had, however, connected before, Alessi and Bynum, for example, and Fujiwara and Cleaver too. The leader also brings an inspired approach to the arrangements by switching up the pairings and adding and subtracting musicians. The opening “Pack Up, Coming For You” illustrates as much in forcefully following one trio—Fujiwara, Bynum, and Halvorson—with the other until all eventually convene for full group interplay.
March wasn't arbitrarily chosen for the title as march grooves do, in fact, surface in a few of the seven pieces. To illustrate, a frothy march pulse drives the combustible “Wave Shake and Angle Bounce,” with the intricacy of its design vaguely calling to mind a Henry Threadgill composition for Very Very Circus, no matter the differences in instrumentation between the ensembles. The word applies in another way, too, specifically to the idea of musicians operating in tandem and with common purpose.
In terms of execution, the ensemble takes its cue from the leader, whose playing's marked by imagination, responsiveness, and fluidity. Fujiwara's command of the kit translates into playing that's always confidently grounded yet amenable to what's arising in the moment. On the guitar front, Halvorson's her usual unmistakable and inimitable self—witness the shred she gets up to in the opening part of “Pack Up, Coming For You”—and Seabrook's no shrinking violet either, as his own blistering contributions to “The March of the Storm Before the Quiet of the Dance” and “Docile Fury Ballad” demonstrate. Alessi and Bynum likewise complement one another effectively, as do the drummers, the two careful to not bury the others under their paired attack. Be forewarned that the heat the six generate is at times volcanic, though restrained episodes do also emerge, with “Silhouettes in Smoke,” the leader on vibraphone, a case in point.
There's little to quibble over, though one might question why the improvised drum duet, “For Alan, Part II,” that arrives at album's end needed to last seventeen minutes, as engaging as the interplay is. Fujiwara's sincere affection for his childhood teacher, Alan Dawson, is clearly communicated by the gesture, but I'd rather have had, say, a seven-minute drum duet and a ten-minute sextet performance in its place. As caveats go, however, it's a small one when there's so much else to get behind. Laid down in pre-COVID times, March sounds no less powerful for being released more than two years after its December 2019 recording date.March 2022