Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Satoko Fujii: Hazuki

8

Satoko Fujii: Hazuki

By

View read count
Satoko Fujii: Hazuki
Going back to the early 1960s, consider Brian Wilson, of Beach Boys fame. And consider his song "In My Room" (with lyrics co-written with Gary Usher), issued as a single and included in the 1963 album Surfer Girl (Capitol Records). It is a sound of loneliness, a poem to a sanctuary, a place that makes it possible to "Lock out all my worries and my fears." It was a breakthrough of sorts for the Beach Boys, a step away from songs about surfing and cars and girls, into a more personal world of Wilson's loneliness and isolation. It still stands as one of Wilson's loveliest songs.

Leap forward more than half a century, a take a hundred and eighty degree turn in terms of genre, then cross the Pacific (away from Brian Wilson's Southern California perspective), where avant-garde jazz pianist Satoko Fujii retreats to her room, to her piano—not out of any Wilson-ian diffidence, temperamental fragility or introversion (a person who makes music like Fujii's could not be an introvert), but out of the necessity of quarantine and isolation that came with the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Wilson's room was in his parents' house in Hawthorne, California; Fujii's room is in her apartment in Kobe City, Japan. It is where she recorded her solo piano album, Hazuki.

Fujii works in ensembles of all sizes, from duos like 2020's Pentas (Not Two Records, 2020), with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, to big band outings including Entity (Libra Records, 2020) with her Satoko Fujii Orchestra New York. And every ensemble size in between. All of her music is adventurous, most includes an element of turmoil, some is calamitous, almost all of it features interludes of stunning beauty; but Fujii's concept of beauty—idiosyncratic and surreal—is most consistently present in her solo work, on Solo (Libra Records, 2018), Stone (Libra Records, 2018), Invisible Hand (Cortez Sounds, (2017), and Gen Himmel (Libra Records, 2012). And now, especially, with Hazuki, a work of unwavering consistency of vision that spotlights Fujii's unique musical soul.

"I have been playing my piano for forty-five years," says Fujii. "We know each other well."

Fuji's familiarity with this complex mechanical instrument (no two are the same) combined with the quarantine restrictions and the complete aloneness of the recording process—could these have sharpened Fujii's already remarkable focus, on display in the disc's opener, "Invisible," that begins with eerie whisperings, tinkles and clanks—"the sound of something creeping up on us," like a soundtrack to a Shirley Jackson story. This mood plays out patiently, ominously, creating a feeling of gathering dread.

"Clusters" is a tune inspired by the late April 2020 reports of Corona clusters. "To a musician," Fujii explains, "a cluster is a chord made of adjacent tones." Fujii makes her own clusters, sonic multi-hued fireworks bursts, colors clashing, colliding and coalescing, interspersed with moments of gorgeous solemnity.

"Hoffen" is the German word for "hope." Fujii lived in Germany for four years, but never mastered the language. Her rendition of "Hoffen" is part of giving that effort another try, while addressing optimism for overcoming the Covid crises, in a manner that the world beat the Spanish Flu of 1918. The sound is cautiously sanguine, placidly pretty, determined, intent on the horizon. Here, and throughout, Fujii works inside the piano, manipulating the strings to create subtle orchestrations and odd percussion sounds—all part of her unconstrained palette.

"Twenty-Four Degress" (celsius) closes the disc. It refers to Kobe's temperature (in the 90s, fahrenheit) in August, 2020, when Fujii recorded these sounds, in her apartment in an un-air-conditioned room. It is a slow, unrelenting joy, in spite of what some might consider oppressive conditions. That is how Satoko Fujii, in her room, rolls.

Track Listing

Invisible; Quarantine; Clusters; Hoffen; Beginning; Ernesto; Expanding; Twenty-Four Degrees.

Personnel

Album information

Title: Hazuki | Year Released: 2021 | Record Label: Libra Records

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

Tramonto
John Taylor
Ki
Natsuki Tamura / Satoko Fujii
Duality Pt: 02
Dom Franks' Strayhorn
The Sound of Raspberry
Tatsuya Yoshida / Martín Escalante

Popular

Old Home/New Home
The Brian Martin Big Band
My Ideal
Sam Dillon
Ecliptic
Shifa شفاء - Rachel Musson, Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders
Lado B Brazilian Project 2
Catina DeLuna & Otmaro Ruíz

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.