Satoko Fujii: Dream a Dream

Japanese pianist and composer Satoko Fujii has long demonstrated her ability to marshal ensembles of varying size—from intimate duos to sprawling orchestras—with an ear attuned to both spontaneity and design. On Dream A Dream, the second release from her Tokyo Trio, she reaffirms that a small group can still conjure orchestral breadth when agency and imagination run free. With bassist Takashi Sugawa and drummer Ittetsu Takemura, Fujii leads a unit whose cohesion now feels even more instinctive than on their debut Jet Black (Libra, 2024).

Recorded during a European tour, the day before the trio's performance at the 2024 Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival, the session captures a band in mid-flight—seasoned by the road, yet still nimble and exploratory. Fujii's five charts offer just enough scaffolding for collective invention. While many of her customary hallmarks are apparent—the intricate unisons, the precipitate starts and stops, the canny use of space—she sets them within a more improvisatory framework than many of her projects. Passages of hushed timbral interchange and prickly texture vie with flashes of high drama. Her writing here avoids familiar jazz tropes—no vamped figures or looping motifs. Instead, fragments appear, vanish and re- emerge, as if glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.

Sugawa and Takemura bring an unruly attitude, even as they buy into Fujii's idiosyncratic universe, and she gives them ample opportunity to dive deep into the weeds, often unescorted. As a consummate improviser herself, no stranger to such pursuits, she responds by delving under the lid of the piano to extract unlikely but apt sonorities. But her presence is not everywhere as elusive. She opens the album alone, clanking, soaring, and shuddering with dynamic contrasts, in a statement of intent. As it continues, "Second Step" threads together solo episodes for each member with crisp accords and conversational interplay.

She creates settings that expose the mercurial talents of her crew in the best possible light. As a case in point, the multifaceted title track unfolds with painterly patience. Fujii and Sugawa often move in tandem—tracing outlines more than delivering lines—while the pianist allows Takemura free rein for his tonal investigations. As a consequence, here and elsewhere, he becomes less a timekeeper than a textural colorist, expanding the trio's palette with every phrase.

What defines Dream A Dream is not its heft but its intimacy. Fujii writes as a composer who knows when to let go, trusting her collaborators to bridge the gaps. But with a restraint that means that in this trio, even silence sometimes finds a voice.