Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio: Dream a Dream

Pianist Satoko Fujii's artistic vision has held a sharp focus since her recording debut in the late '90s. She has maintained that focus in almost every jazz ensemble configuration imaginable. That unwavering focus, combined with a superhuman creative momentum, has resulted—as of 2025—in a discography of more than a hundred albums. She has been especially effective in her work with the piano trio format, opening up that door via her Satoko Fujii Trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black, on bass and drums, respectively. She also released an album with her New Trio in 2019. Her Tokyo Trio's Dream a Dream, the album at hand, was featured on two previous album releases.

"Why a new trio?," Fujii was asked by the set's liner-note writer, Kazue Yokoi, referring to the Dream a Dream group, featuring bassist Takashi Sugawa and drummer Ittetsu Takemura.

"I just thought it would be fun to play in a trio with Sugawa-san and Takemura-san," Fujii replied. As simple as that. No pretense. No deep hidden purpose, just some fun making music. And this is how Fujii has perfected her focus and made some of the most stimulating offbeat music imaginable—sounds so different from anything else spinning around out there that an initial encounter with her music can make the proposition that she has beamed down to Earth from outer space seem a possibility.

How to describe Dream a Dream in an Earthly mode? Melody, rhythm and harmony? They are there, but in a disjointed way, rambling, veering off into unexpected tangents. Doors slam, ghosts moan, a handful of marbles clatter down a wooden staircase as Fujii works her sorcery inside the piano. At times the music could serve as a soundtrack to Shirley Jackson's 1959 horror novel House on Haunted Hill or Stanley Kubrick's 1980 take on Stephen King's,The Shining (1977), as the trio careens down a dark hallway then slows up to sneak into a dark cellar or up into the slant-roofed attic, all through the journey bumping bookshelves and china cabinets, reaching heavenward to run a hand through the hanging crystals of the chandelier as somewhere deeper in the house a door creaks on a rusty hinge. If not from outer space, did she slip over from a spirit world?

Does it sound chaotic? At times. But Fujii has a strong grip on, and a method to, what may seem like chaos. Improvisation is a big part of her plan, but so is the written score. A random example: In 2008 a curious listener—six years into an ongoing experience of Fujii World—lurked on the sidewalk outside Dizzy's in San Diego, awaiting Fujii and her Ma-Do quartet. Pre-show, the doors were locked, but he could see—hands cupped around his eyes to peer through a tinted window—and he could hear Fujii and her group as they exploded into a soundcheck of a readily identifiable tune from the then-latest Ma-Do album, Heat Wave (NotTwo Records, 2008). The tune evolved into a new-to-the-world improvisational segment. During the show, it was the same thing: a familiar clamor to open things, then, again, a seat-of-the-pants improvisation from another world.

Dream a Dream is of the same method, with Fujii expanding, once again, her original sonic vision by her hopefully ongoing Tokyo Trio.