Natsuki Tamura, Satoko Fujii: Aloft

A lot of ink has poured from the pens of jazz writers in ruminations on the art of Satoko Fujii. With over a hundred album releases under her name and under the names of various groups she has led, she has given the scribes plenty to listen to and write about. Solo albums, big band albums and every size ensemble in between have come out in relative dribs and drabs—three or four releases a year—or in torrents (see 2022 comment below).

Her musical journey, which began in 1997 and cranked up into the highest gear with 2022's album-release-per-month celebration, continues. One of 2024's offerings (by July of the year she had already given us more than most artists do in a year), Aloft features Fujii in a duo setting with her marital and musical partner, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura.

Fujii is particularly adept at the duo format, having released eight previous recordings with Tamura, a few with bassist Joe Fonda, and with drummers Ramón López and Tatsuya Yoshida, vibraphonist Taiko Saito and more. In this intimate format, Fujii and her collaborators shine brightest, and freedom flies.

The freedom is mostly subdued on Aloft, a Natsuki Tamura and Satoko Fujii outing. Fujii calls on her classical background to play beautiful complexities. Tamura blows a good deal of straight-ahead trumpet, but he also uses noise—hisses and moans, quacks and elephantine calls which sound like the cries of a pachyderm suffering stuffy sinuses. But then noise is always a part of the Fujii artistry, and Tamura is there to push this aspect along. If that sounds off-putting, it is not. Musical partners for three decades, the duo has evolved ways of making the strangest of sounds fit into the greater whole. In 2008 at a Fujii show in San Diego with her group Ma-Do, an audience member dropped her cell phone on the tile floor, injecting a plastic clatter into the music. At the tune's end, Fujii thanked the woman with the phone for making a beautiful noise to fit into the music. That is how Fujii rolls. Anything can be incorporated. Tamura also mimicked the sound of the horn of a passing freight train in the same concert, and in 2024, a cell phone on a counter twinkling with an incoming call does not detract from the listening experience as Aloft plays on the sound system. It is almost as if Tamura and Fujii conjured it.

Fujii and Tamura's creations often pin a listener to the back of their chair and blow the chair back against the wall. They can also charm, seduce, bewilder and ease a worried mind. Aloft is of the latter variety, perhaps their best duo disc to date.