Satoko Fujii GEN: Altitude 1100 Meters

With over a hundred album releases in her discography, featuring solo outings and big band bashes and everything in between, pianist-composer Satoko Fujii could be thought to have "done it all." But there was a missing link. Strings. Though she had recorded in duet outings with violinists Mark Feldman and Carla Kihlstedt, she had never written for or worked with a string ensemble. Always (always, always always) up for a challenge, she convened a group she called GEN, Japanese for string.

The resulting album is titled Altitude 1100 Meters. The inspiration? The air at that 3600-foot location in the highlands of the Nagano prefecture where Fujii summered with her elderly parents to escape the oppressive heat of the lowlands. Says Fujii: "The scenery and the cool breezes were of course a pleasure, but what really affected me was the texture of the air. I found my imagination stirred by the rich palette of feelings I experienced with the constant changes in the air over the course of each day, from dawn to dusk."

The result is a thematically linked collage of sounds. Fujii is an avant-garde artist, and where that "avant" tag often conjures an expectation of aversive sounds or scrambled senseless noise, Fujii and two violins, a viola, bass, drums and her piano give the aversive a wide berth as they craft a mostly gentle, freewheeling soundscape featuring plucked and bowed strings, a sprinkling of electronics, some subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—drums and Fujii's unpredictable (always) piano.

The overall feel is one of a classical recital unrestrained by the conventions of classical music—or any kind of music for that matter. Stings are in the forefront a good deal of the time, and Fujii has chosen her string players well. Moments of Fujii-esque boisterousness surface occasionally as GEN navigates the day, from "Morning Haze" to "Morning Sun," to "Early Afternoon" to "Light Rain" and finally "Twilight."

The nearly twenty-minute "Light Rain" is particularly entrancing. Fujii has the potential to make explosive music, but here the tone is understated, spacious and obliquely beautiful. Altitude 1100 Meters, her first foray into working with a string ensemble, is likely to open new doors for her. Stay tuned.

Comments