Whether she’s playing solo piano or leading one of her various
large ensembles, pianist and composer Satoko Fujii will tug you toward the
details.
اضافة اعلان
The leader of a dizzying array of ensembles both large and
small, Fujii is arguably the most prolific pianist in jazz — if also among the
most underrecognized. Since the 1990s, she has released close to 100 albums,
mostly through her own Libra Records label. Two years ago, celebrating her 60th
birthday, a milestone known as “kanreki” in Japanese culture, she put out a new
album each month, including both solo piano and big-band works.
Fujii says that she seems to hear music everywhere, and she
feels challenged to channel the sensations of the world as directly as she can.
“This probably sounds strange, but when I compose, I feel like the music is
already there — we just didn’t notice,” she said in a recent interview from her
home in Kobe, Japan. “I feel like I’m just looking for something that was
hidden but that is already there.” The sound of an airplane overhead, an
overheard conversation, even the rustling of trees can provide a spark.
Without access to gigs, jam sessions or a recording studio
during pandemic lockdown, she felt herself becoming unmoored. On walks around
Kobe, she was touched by the uncanny nervousness of the atmosphere, but she and
her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, had nobody else to play with.
“Everything was canceled,” she said. “I felt like: Who am I?”
She decided to outfit her tiny piano room, which barely fits her
beloved Steinway grand, with a home-studio setup. Then she continued writing
and recording and releasing music, at an even faster clip than before.
Across all of Fujii’s work, contradictions come into balance;
although her music is abstract and sometimes wild, each element shimmers with
clarity. In situations large and small, her tender attention to detail is
equaled by her ability to convey enormous breadth and textural range. Listening
to her, visual-art metaphors become tempting: These works are as complex and
detail-driven as, say, a Mark Bradford canvas, and just as huge in scale.
Since the start of quarantine she has posted well over a dozen
albums to her Bandcamp page. They include “Prickly Pear Cactus,” a trio disc
that she and Tamura made with electronic musician Ikue Mori, trading sound
files via email and building gradually on one another’s work; “Beyond,” a set
of serene duets with vibraphonist Taiko Saito; and a solo-piano album,
“Hazuki,” available on CD on Friday, featuring compositions Fujii wrote in the
early months of quarantine.
Writing by email, Mori said she had started collaborating with
Fujii a few years ago after having heard from other musicians on the scene
about a pianist with a “dynamic and diverse style.” The “Prickly Pear Cactus”
project had allowed them to collaborate at an unhurried pace. “This time,
taking our time playing and working on the details, was a perfect situation for
both of us,” Mori said.
Born in Tokyo, Fujii was obsessed with music from her early
childhood, but she didn’t immediately excel at it. She remembers that classical
piano didn’t come easily, and some instructors were less supportive than
others. As a teenager, she said, one classical teacher told her: “If you just
keep playing, when you get to be my age, like 70, you’d be a great piano
player. Anyone can
be a good piano player. Just keep playing.”
After high school, Fujii earned a scholarship to the Berklee
College of Music in Boston, moving there in 1985. As a young pianist, she was
still figuring out how to position herself in relation to the jazz tradition,
and she hadn’t yet written much of her own music when she attended a
composition master class led by Chick Corea.
“He said that just as we practice playing an instrument, we also
can practice making compositions,” she said. “That was very new for me at that
time. I decided, ‘OK, so maybe I can just do that.’” Maybe tirelessly putting
in the work really was what mattered most — even when it comes to composing.
After Berklee, Fujii returned to Japan for a time, working as a
teacher and session musician while developing a reputation in Tokyo as a
farseeing bandleader. Then, in 1993, she returned to Boston to attend graduate
school at the New England Conservatory. There she studied with the influential
pianist Paul Bley, renowned for his wandering, dreamlike approach to
improvising. He heard something within Fujii’s playing that she hadn’t
completely unleashed, she said, and he encouraged her to cut away as much jazz
orthodoxy as she could.
“He said, ‘You cannot play like some other person,’” she said.
“‘If you play like yourself, there is a
reason to get your CD.’”
The pair kept in touch after her graduation, and in 1995 they
recorded “Something About Water,” a remarkable piano duet that was also one of
Fujii’s first self-released albums on Libra. Soon she was getting calls to
perform around the avant-garde scene in Brooklyn, where she and Tamura
eventually moved for a year and a half.
She ultimately returned to Japan but not before laying the
foundation for what would become Orchestra New York, a big band featuring many
of the finest improvisers in the city. She has released a handful of albums
with the group, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. She has
also maintained Orchestra Tokyo, composed of musicians there, and Orchestra
Berlin, which she founded during a five-year stint living in Germany in the
2010s. Each orchestra has a different relationship to Fujii’s music, and
perhaps she writes a little differently for each one.
Tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby has played with Orchestra New York
since the ’90s. He said that Fujii’s instructions to the band can often seem
maddeningly understated, and she rarely records more than one take of each
tune. Sometimes, Malaby said, it’s not until he hears the recording played back
that he gets a full measure of the music’s depth. “The simplicity is beyond the
imagination,” he said.
“You’re done, and you’re on the train, and you’re like, ‘What
the hell was that?’” Malaby continued, describing the experience of leaving a
recording session with the orchestra. “And then you get the CD in the mail, and
it’s so powerful.”
He was struck by how ably Fujii applied the language of her solo
piano playing to her large ensembles, where she rarely plays a note on the
keyboard. “She’s transcended the piano with the orchestra, and it sounds like
when she plays trio or solo,” he said.
Fujii said that she doesn’t think differently about the process
of recording a solo album or one with a large band. Either way, it’s about
using sound to make life’s complexities a little more graspable. “The energy
that I spend on a project, whether solo or for big band, it’s pretty much the
same,” she said. “I just focus on it, spending time, 100% of my energy.”
