By Jerry D'Souza

It is a rather warm afternoon on the cusp of spring. The Knitting Factory in downtown Manhattan is gearing up for a concert by the Satoko Fujii Orchestra. The band members have just finished rehearsing for the show, and it is an opportune time to speak to Fujii, who has been making a mark not only as a composer but also as a pianist of outstanding calibre.

Fujii is down to earth and at ease in a little bar that is just beginning to waken for the evening. She settles down on a stool across a small round table and unfolds her story.

Fujii's initiation came when she was four with the study of classical music.

"When I went to kindergarten, I was not happy", she says with a light smile. "I told my mom that, and I quit. She thought it would be better for me to do something else besides being in the house, so she took me for piano lessons."

After she finished high school, Fujii planned on attending a classical music conservatory. "I was preparing for the audition and I began to get bored. At that time I had a classical teacher who had learnt jazz when he was 60. He quit classical music to become a house jazz pianist. He was a big influence on me. I also got tired with the constitution of the classical world and wanted to find other music."

Her quest for the different directed her to the Berklee School of Music. She stayed there from 1985 to 1988 and studied jazz theory. Going back to Japan, she played in clubs and in television shows. Did she find the latter interesting?

"No," she laughs. "Right after I graduated I had no idea what I could do. I wanted to try everything." This included playing in the band of her husband trumpeter Natsuki Tamura (with whom she later recorded the album How Many? (Leo Lab)), and writing for them. But she did not feel comfortable with her music. A change was about to come.

In 1993, Satoko went to the New England Conservatory of Music where she met two of the most forward thinkers in jazz, Paul Bley (with whom she recorded Something About Water (Libra), a set of eight duets and three solo pieces) and George Russell. They changed her approach, and attitude, towards her music.

"I cannot imagine my musical life without Paul Bley. He gave me a lot of ideas and showed me a different side of the music. I had been trying to play bebop and also to imitate Chick Corea and McCoy Tyner. Paul told me that didn't make any sense. McCoy Tyner already existed. If I played like him, no one would pay attention. It took me a long time to realize that. He helped me a lot to open myself and to play my music. George Russell's Lydian Concept really affected me. In this concept any music can be analyzed. That meant I could be free and open."

Her attitude is the key to her open ended approach. She has an extended virtuosity, which can be seen in the writing she does for different combinations that move form duos to big bands.

"When I am at home, I practice from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. The first thing I do is improvise for about 20 minutes, then I compose. This is my routine. If I have plans to record with my trio, I write music for that. I have the idea for the instrumentation. But most of the time I write lines, or harmonies or just ideas. It does not have to be for a certain instrumentation."

She has also leaned into Japanese folk music for inspiration. Was it easy to translate Japanese harmony into a jazz context?

"Japanese folk music basically does not have harmony. They are lines and rhythm. When I use the music, I sometimes take the line to the drum or take the harmony to the line. I use the material in different ways." "People have different ideas about music. Some want to hear something they know. Others like me would like to share something we never heard before and expect something very exciting to happen in the music. Most people when they hear the music that they know, the harmonies that they know, feel happy. I like to bring something new into my music. I think some are afraid of that."

It is her open-minded approach that nails her music. She gives her players plenty of room to improvise, opening the avenues to a welter of ideas. In doing so she enriches her compositions. "I get all great players and I trust them," she says, quite matter of fact.

Among those with whom she has established musical relationships are bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black, with whom she recorded Looking Out The Window (Nippon Crown) and Toward, "To West" (Enja). There is a spontaneous empathy between them and they pick, feed and extend ideas in seamless fashion.

Fujii records with musicians from Japan and the United States. This gives her music another adjunct, one that can be seen to advantage on the aptly titled Double Take (ewe Records). One CD is the realm of her Japanese band, the other the domain of her American outfit. Some tunes are common to both, but with discernable differences. Subtleties apart, it is the compositions that blood the music.

Perhaps the secret of her success lies in this. "Over the last three or four years when I compose, I don't use any rules or theory. I just try to find the right notes for me."

Judging from her body of work, who would want to argue?