Satoko Fujii: Hazuki
Libra Records

Futari: Beyond
Libra Records

Pianist Satoko Fujii gives new meaning to the word prolific. Few others can boast of having appeared on nearly 100 albums as a leader or co-leader, with that total bolstered by the twelve she released—one per month—during 2018 to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. While a number of releases feature Fujii with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, the pianist continues to inspire herself by collaborating with a broad array of other artists. Exemplifying that tendency is Futari (“two people” in Japanese), a new project that pairs Fujii with vibraphonist Taiko Saito on their debut release Beyond. Both channel their virtuosic abilities into nine settings recorded on June 26, 2019 at the Oda Community Center Subaru Concert Hall in Japan.

Fujii met Saito about fifteen years ago when she was a music student at the Berlin University of the Arts and then again in 2006 when the young vibraphonist attended a Dresden club date by Fujii and her quartet. They stayed in contact through Saito's move to Berlin and grew closer when the pianist and Tamura themselves relocated to Berlin. Yet despite their ongoing connection, Fujii and Saito didn't perform together aside from a classroom session at the music school where she taught. That changed in 2017 when the two performed with percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn under the name Puzzle, which was in turn followed by a June 2019 duo tour in Japan and a recording session after their Matsuyama concert.

Certainly one of the things that has contributed to Fujii's long-term success is versatility. Her attack can be aggressive, even thunderous, yet she's also capable of playing with delicacy and understatement. Adding to her skill set, she's as comfortable playing inside the piano as at the keyboard and thus avails herself as a responsive sparring partner. For her part, Saito is no longer the teenager admiring her experienced elder but a partner fully engaged with the seasoned vet in these ponderous meditations.

The sounds the two coax from their instruments extend, yes, beyond the norm. In “Molecular,” for example, sustained vibraphone tones establish an ethereal ground over which gamelan-sounding piano notes appear. Adding to the unusual sound design, Fujii elaborates upon it with prepared piano accents, the result a deeply connected exercise in textural exploration. “Proliferation” is no less striking in its merging of cavernous rumblings with percussive piano treatments. Here and elsewhere, the musicians move between background and foreground with ease, each one supporting the other as their playing adjusts to the music's development. Bowed vibraphone at the outset of “Todokanai Tegami” suggests whale cries, after which prepared piano strums and creaking noises add a nightmarish ambiance. Gradually an almost classical style of playing infuses Fujii's lilting expressions, though the unsettling mood remains due to the bowed vibraphone's shimmer.

“On the Road” sees the duo playing in a style closer to conventional jazz improvisation, though not displeasingly. Melodic themes are voiced, and both partners emphasize natural acoustic timbres in the performance. “Mizube,” by comparison, features the two involved in an elusive cat-and-mouse game. To be precise, Beyond isn't a collection of improvisations, even if improvisation is a key component (six tracks are credited to Fujii as composer, one to Saito, and two as a duo). Fujii's “Ame No Ato,” for instance, is grounded in a very clear structure, with its wildly free soloing framed by a haunting melodic figure. It hardly needs stating that Beyond is anything but a collection of shopworn standards covered by a vibes-and-piano outfit.

Like many a musician grappling with COVID-19-related restrictions, the pianist responded resourcefully. Unable to perform in a public space, she channeled her creative energy into a set of solo piano works recorded in her piano practice room at home in August 2020. In time, Hazuki—an old Japanese word for “August”—will be looked upon as one of a large number of pandemic-recorded albums that in different ways reflect the exceptional circumstances of the moment. One upside of the enforced recording set-up is the intimate relationship Fujii has with her home piano, which she's played for more than forty-five years. Recording there also granted her the luxury of multiple takes, something a block of time in the studio mightn't allow as easily. Complicating the process, however, was the hot August temperature, which prompted her to place an ice pad on her neck while playing to reduce sweat.

Introducing Hazuki is “Invisible,” which Fujii herself characterizes as “the sound of something we can't see creeping up on us”; sure enough, the piece plays as if the pandemic cloud is drifting in, enshrouding everything with oppressive gloom as it does so. The pianist couples textural effects generated from the inside strings with a cryptic theme to convey slow and insidious spread. Like others on the release, the piece also reminds us of her sensitivity to space, something easy to overlook when she's playing aggressively. In the spidery labyrinth she explores in “Quarantined,” a sense of claustrophobia seems to set in, whereas “Cluster” was written after she learned about the outbreak of “corona clusters” and was thus structured with chords of adjacent tones. Lest one deem Hazuki an unrelentingly depressive set, certain tracks offset its darker tonalities, most directly the expansive, classically tinged meditation “Hoffen,” whose title is German for “Hope.” Her virtuosity is on full display throughout “Ernesto,” titled after the real name of Che Guevara, whose passion and uncompromising will inspired the piece.

April 2021