Jazz Articles about Satoko Fujii

About Satoko Fujii

Live Review

Citadelic Citadelpark Gent, Belgium May 29-June 2, 2019 Free jazz with free admission. That's the appealing concept of the five-day Citadelic festival, which presents jazz, improvisation and other adventurous sounds, from around noon until around 10pm, in a continuous schedule that roams several dips and mounts, or caves and corners, of the sprawling Citadelpark in the beautiful Belgian city of Gent. El Negocito record label director Rogé Verstraete is given the keys ...

Album Review

Satoko Fujii: Stone

by Karl Ackermann
May 30, 2019

There is something reassuring in Satoko Fujii's solo work, even in its most distant forms. While the pianist and composer doesn't repeat the past, the unexpected character of her music is itself the Fujii brand. In a 2018 All About Jazz interview, she spoke of her desire to create music never heard before. With Stone, she continues to conceive the inconceivable while remaining entertaining and thought provoking. Stone consists of fifteen relatively short pieces, many using multiple parts ...

Album Review

Satoko Fujii: Stone

Read "Stone" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
May 29, 2019

The turning of the calendar page to the year 2019 presented a dilemma for pianist/composer/bandleader Satoko Fujii: how to follow up her 2018 CD release-per-month marathon in celebration of her sixtieth birthday—called kanreki in Japan. Would she be tapped out or wearied after the frenetic release pace of the previous year? Or would the relentless creativity sharpen her sense of focus, give a boost to her idea of “what comes next?" For Fujii, not surprisingly, it was the ...

Album Review

Alister Spence & Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe: Imagine Meeting You Here

Read "Imagine Meeting You Here" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro

by Alberto Bazzurro
May 7, 2019

Un bell'organico composto da musicisti in orbita-Satoko Fujii (a partire dal marito e compagno di mille battaglie musicali Natsuki Tamura) rilegge pagine orchestrali frutto della vis compositiva dell'australiano Alister Spence, con cui la pianista nipponica ha ripetutamente collaborato in tempi più o meno recenti (il loro primo incontro risale al 2007). L'impianto è—per così dire—misto, nel senso che a passaggi corali nitidamente predeterminati si alternano aree improvvisative piuttosto libere (non il classico assolo sopra un dato tessuto ...

Multiple Reviews

Satoko Fujii's Orchestras

by Jerome Wilson
February 21, 2019

Among pianist and composer Satoko Fujii's many and varied ensembles are the orchestras she leads in various cities. These two releases contrast Fujii's approach to orchestral music with the results of another composer writing for one of her orchestras. Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo Kikoeru Libra 2018 Kikoeru was the final release in Fujii's ambitious 60th birthday CD-a-month program last year. All the music on the disc was composed either by Fujii ...

Album Review

Alister Spence: Imagine Meeting You Here

Read "Imagine Meeting You Here" reviewed by Doug Hall

by Doug Hall
January 30, 2019

Imagine Meeting You Here (Alister Spence Music, 2019) is the release by Alister Spence, a recognized leader in Australia's new music directive and one of his country's most original and distinctive jazz pianists and composers of orchestral pieces. Certainly there is a reflection in the title of this release that is his biographical journey and meeting in musical imagination. A project that developed in 2015 when Spence was beginning a doctoral PhD in creative practice (music composition) which morphed into ...

Album Review

Alister Spence and Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe: Imagine Meeting You Here

Read "Imagine Meeting You Here" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
January 12, 2019

The year 2018 saw two “sounds-you've-never-heard-before" collaborations between Australian composer/pianist/electronics master Alister Spence and Japanese pianist/bandleader Satoko Fujii, the duo recording Intelstat (Alister Spence Music), and Kira Kira (Libra Records) by the Fujii quartet Bright Force. These recordings were part of Fujii's “one CD release per month" celebration of her sixtieth birthday year. The duo opened 2019 with the Spence-led Imagine Meeting You Here, featuring the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, one of many (it's hard to keep count) ...