Arina Fujiwara: Neon

Neon, pianist-composer—arranger Arina Fujiwara's luminous debut release, ends on an unexpected note, a solo take on Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), his most popular and enduring tune. It complements her program of four excellent originals and an inspired reconception of "Hotaru Koi," a Japanese children's song. Fujiwara's "Maple Leaf Rag" flows out of Joplin's classic ragtime style but is full of her own playful virtuosity. Beginning out of time, she moves freely from one rhythmic-harmonic eddy to the next, changing tempos and feels, adding and altering things with each step, putting her imprint on it. One hears "Maple Leaf Rag," but she never plays it exactly as written. What she offers is a close contrafact, a subtly contemporized counterpart. This is a move straight out of Joplin's playbook; he published no less than four compositions based on the harmonic scheme of "Maple Leaf Rag": "The Cascades" (1904), "Leola" (1905), "Gladiolus Rag," and "Sugar Cane" (1908).

Fujiwara's nine-piece orchestra is conducive to a kind of baroque concerto grosso setup, with jazz ensemble and string quartet pitted against one another. She uses it this way in "Yuki Ga Furu," the album opener, a minor-mode piece in a meter of three. Classical strings lead the exposition, then the rhythm section steps in with elegant solos from Fujiwara and bassist Dan Finn. Toward the end, the texture thickens to encompass the full ensemble, with agitated tremolo in the strings and sudden punches in the piano. The density ends abruptly, leaving cello alone to reprise the first theme as the piece concludes. The performance has a delicate early-music quality, but refracted through Fujiwara's idiosyncratic jazz lens. Her improvised embellishments are especially piquant. She sometimes approaches the minor third from above (from the major third), to create an unusual blue-note-in-reverse effect. For singers and guitarists, the typical blues move would be to slide up toward the major third from below, stopping on the desired neutral third (not major, not minor). Pianists have created all sorts of wonderful techniques for simulating this effect and the blues intonation. Fujiwara's major-minor ornament adds to the tool box in a unique way. An embellishment is a tiny thing that can be tremendously affecting. Her unusual little blue cry is that.

Fujiwara and her euphonious nonet work with a distinctive variety of sounds, feels, textures, and genres. In her extraordinary arrangement of "Hotaru Koi," the children's folk song, the band suddenly lifts off into a reverberant electronic world that encourages a faster, more dissonant intensity, an expanded sound palette, and a freer type of improvisation (check Brad Kang's guitar, YouTube at bottom of page). Stylistic contrasts between string quartet and jazz combo are finely balanced. As with Charlie Parker with Strings (Mercury, 1950), the strings do not try to swing; the jazz improvisers envelope them in swing. In "Neon," the title cut, Vid Jamnik's vibes and her piano create a shimmering unison blend that sounds like a single instrument. It all works.