Bassist Fumi Tomita Enters The Spirit Realm On "Yokai! Songs Of The Japanese Supernatural," Releasing October 16 On Origin Records

Bassist-composer Fumi Tomita chronicles a series of musical ghost stories—of a sort—with the October 16 release of Yokai! Songs of the Japanese Supernatural on Origin Records. Heading a quartet featuring Carl Clements on saxophones and flute, Jason Ennis on guitar, and Gary Fieldman on drums, Tomita creates sonic interpretations of the yokai: a lineage of shapeshifting wraiths, spirits, monsters, and other supernatural beings that populates Japanese folklore.

For Tomita, these mythical spirits carried real and visceral weight. Born in New York to a father who’d immigrated from Japan, he was navigating grief and spiritual crisis after his father’s 2023 death when he began exploring the images in a book of Japanese woodblock images that his wife had given him. “I was looking to record spiritual music in a way that suited the way I play,” he recalls. “I felt like I had seen some of those demons and monsters on masks and logos in Japan and knew that it was a perfect fit.”

The music of Yokai! evokes both the image and the character of the titular entities: ethereal but unsettling; dark, slinky, and eerie; alternately projecting mischief and malevolence. Moreover, the pieces morph in shape and mood. “Betobeto-san” transforms from a slithery, deliberately paced melody to an ungainly, chaos-courting affair, while “Raiju (Thunder Beast)” alters its rhythmic trajectory erratically, like the lightning balls associated with the creature. Also like its namesake, the opening “Daija (Monster Snake)” wends this way and that, trying on and shrugging off melodic, rhythmic, and formal ideas.

Yet among these sinister portrayals, there are also moments of startling beauty. Among the album’s most otherworldly tunes, “Kitsune (The Fox)” is also among its most graceful, featuring a long and low-toned solo by Tomita that suggests the sharing of celestial secrets. “Amabiko (Sea Lad)” finds Clements articulating on flute an elegant, comely melody that seems a seductive call against Ennis’s pastoral guitar scenery. And the conclusory “Hyakki Yagyo (A Night Parade of 100 Demons)” is a playful, beguiling scene, Clements’s soprano whirling and twisting over a curious 7/4 groove.

It’s all a little bit unusual, a little bit out of phase with the normal: Exactly what one might imagine in the realm of ghosts and demons. Yet Yokai! is also strangely welcoming to the listener, Tomita and friends inviting us to find our footing in this alien, out-of-step world.

Fumi Tomita was born November 26, 1971 in New York City, the son of a Japanese father and a Chinese-American mother. It was rock music that first beckoned him into its waiting embrace. That said, it was the progressive rock of that late-’70s/early-’80s vintage, and he wasn’t long in finding prog’s close cousin jazz fusion. That, in turn, led him to experiment first with playing piano, then with guitar, and finally bass, the instrument that Tomita took with him into the jazz performance program at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

He spent some time as a working musician in Montreal; spent a year in Portland, Oregon; then returned to his hometown in 2000 to earn a master’s degree at Manhattan School of Music (studying with Jay Anderson and Larry Ridley). Being at MSM put him directly in touch with the New York jazz community, and Tomita began working with the likes of Joey Baron, Vincent Herring, Jeremy Pelt, and Art Hirahara. All the while he continued pursuing musical scholarship, finishing his master’s and going on to study ethnomusicology at Hunter College and jazz and contemporary media at Eastman School of Music (where he met tenor saxophonist Dave Detweiler). He ultimately gained a tenure-track position in the jazz program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he currently teaches.

Tomita’s debut recording, Untold, appeared in 2011, with Impromptu appearing that same year. (The albums were recorded in 2003 and 2004, respectively.) In 2019 came the ambitious The Elephant Vanishes: Jazz Interpretations of the Short Stories of Haruki Murakami,through which Tomita explored his Asian American identity. While Celebration of Bird took him deep into the well of American jazz, Yokai! Songs of the Japanese Supernatural serves as a companion piece to The Elephant Vanishes, allowing him to examine another side of his and his family’s heritage.

Tomita has planned a series of engagements presenting the Yokai! material in an audiovisual context: Sat. 10/17, Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, CT, 4pm; Sun. 10/18, Shapeshifter Lab, Brooklyn, NY, 7pm; Wed. 10/21, UMASS Amherst, Amherst, MA, 7:30pm; Thurs. 10/22, Springfield (MA) Museum, 12:15pm; Sat. 10/31, Van Dyck Music Club, Schenectady, NY; Sun. 11/1, CNY Jazz Central, Syracuse, NY, 7pm; Mon. 11/2, Bop Shop, Rochester, NY, 8pm; Sun. 2/28/2027, Stanford (CA) University (performance and lecture in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the Center for Buddhist Studies).