Jazz Articles about Satoko Fujii

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Zephyros

by Jerry D'Souza
April 6, 2004

Satoko Fujii has the capability of making music in several different contexts and breathing life into each one of them. She is back with her quartet for a third album—and if hope springs eternal, that hope is fully realised. The elements of surprise and change are the constants which make listening to her and her band well worth anticipating.

Fujii likes to compose at a tangent. There are no straight-ahead manifestations in her writing. Whatever the approach, ...

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Zephyros

by Jim Santella
March 4, 2004

Swirling with unbridled energy, Satoko Fujii’s quartet forges ahead with creative improvised music that swings. Jazz has to grow. Here’s an ensemble of forward-looking artists who assure us that it will.

Natsuki Tamura’s open trumpet provides a warm and resolute companionship to the pianist’s highly charged dynamism. Fujii moves around the grand piano’s polished keyboard fluidly, finding natural ways to express various themes. Suite-like, her compositions serve the imagination in much the same way that abstract art ...

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Zephyros

by Dan McClenaghan
February 25, 2004

The opening cut on Zephyros, “The Future of the Past," rumbles in like a thunderstorm, full of bass/drum thunder and scattered piano precipitation, cold rain and spatterings of hail, sudden downpours and sharp cracklings of shattering icicles, a prelude to the eye-of-the-storm, ruminative bass solo full of dark omens and sporadic raindrops punctuating the warning. Meet the Satoko Fujii Quartet. Checking Fujii's biography on her web site, you'll read that her music combines elements of jazz ...

Satoko Fujii Orchestra--East: Before the Dawn

by Dan McClenaghan
September 25, 2003

Settling down in an easy chair and pushing the play button to spin a Satoko Fujii disc is an experience akin to climbing aboard and plunging into a musical version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: careening along a swerving and uncertain path, jerking into spine-jolting ninety degree turns, dipping, climbing, slowing onto the familiar smooth straightaway, where you're unexpectedly assaulted by jarring phenomena. This is especially true of her large ensemble work. Before the Dawn features, live in ...

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Minerva

by Jim Santella
April 2, 2003

With its second album, the Satoko Fujii Quartet takes off. Minerva – the Roman goddess of wisdom, invention, the arts, and martial prowess – must surely be looking down from her high abode these days and smiling. Perhaps Lester Bowie and Don Pullen are sitting alongside her. After all, they share Minerva’s respect for invention and wisdom in the arts more than most earthly souls do.

Pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura have picked up the ...

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Minerva

by Dan McClenaghan
March 16, 2003

Pianist/composer Satoko Fujii--who as much as anybody out there defies the category trap--has recorded in a variety of settings: solo, duo, trio, big band. On 2001's Vulcan, with a quartet, she created arguably her most entrancing sound to date as she teamed with trumpeter (and her husband) Natuki Tamura, bassist Takeharu Hayakawa and drummer Tatsuya Yoshida for one of the most innovative recording of that year.The Japan/New York-based Fujii eploys the same quartet on her new Minerva in ...

Satoko Fujii: Bell the Cat

by Dan McClenaghan
October 3, 2002

A tough review, this new CD, Bell the Cat! by Satoko Fujii. Her art is an indescribable entity. Avant-Garde, adventurous, daring, startling, “out there." All of those and more. Pianist/composer Fujii began her musical journey in Japan, studying classical music. But she soon found that world too dulling and stuffy for her temperment. Improvisation and freedom, it seems, were in her blood, and her own music mixed itself into an amalgam of jazz, classical, traditional Japanese folk, with ...