Satoko Fujii & Natsuki Tamura: Aloft

Feel air move around you throughout the forty-nine or so minutes of Aloft, the latest entry into the ever-compelling soundtrack of Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura's creative coexistence. It ripples like a pond while it roars like the sea. It rafts the updraft and dives in for the kill. It is life in a nutshell: an epic tale of joy a lifetime long. But to hear it revealed in this way—piano, trumpet, lionhearted—is both a privilege and an honor.

Maybe it has been said a hundred million times before that the essence of haiku permeates the music of Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura, or by slim chance this is the first time, but it is the truth so it bears repetition. No matter how much of the couple's music those listening have previously absorbed—their first revelation: How Many (Libra Records, 1997); their sublime third In Krakow In November (Libra Records, 2001); or 2020's crystalline Mantle (Not Two Records)—the music, its telepathy, its topic of discussion, its slang, its metaphors hold an unseen power uniquely and singularly their own.

For example: "Lifting," a gravity-less meditation on the very idea of gravity itself. What holds us? What binds us? What bars our passage from one understanding to the next? It evolves with its bold determination. Its own clarifying intuition. "On the Flyway," perhaps the beating heart of Aloft, its ease, beauty, and temperament could serve as a highlight in anyone's experience of being here, then, or now. An instant treatise and testament, Aloft gathers power and energy from within and then freely releases it. A gift not often bequeathed.