Natsuki Tamura: Summer Tree

In 2002, the Natsuki Tamura Quartet released an album called Hada Hada (Libra Records). It sounded as if it was plugged into ten thousand volts, even Tamura's trumpet, and especially Satoko Fujii's synthesizer, in the making of a soundtrack to a "Cyborgs March on the Capitol" movie. And those cyborgs were mad. Odd stuff. In 2022, Tamura goes it solo on Summer Tree, crafting another soundtrack, Covid style, in isolation, in a small recording studio in his apartment in Kobe, Japan. The music he makes is almost as intense as Hada Hada's, but more of this Earth, like a visit to a dark forest, where cruel ghosts and howling winds hold forth.

It is a solo effort in the sense that it is all Tamura—with the exception of pianist/composer Satoko Fujii's banshee vocalese on "Summer Wind," one of four "Summer" compositions from Tamura, including the title tune, "Summer Color" and "Summer Dream." But it isn't Tamura alone with his horn. He overdubs extended techniques, he plays piano, and a wok, and makes soundscapes as dense as Phil Spector's wall of sound, full of deep drones and low rumbles of thunder. Touchstones? Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvaer, even Miles Davis on "Great Expectations," from the Big Fun (Columbia, 1974) album.

"Out there?" Definitely. But mesmerizingly so. Tamura is a man with a keen sense of humor. The cover art for his 2021 Bandcamp release, Natsuki Tamura Plays Trumpet (Self Produced) shows him with his horn held backwards, his face buried in brass, the mouthpiece pointing forward like a rifle barrel. He is known to chirp like a bird, quack like a duck, and pass gas like a flatulent Basset Hound with his trumpet in any number of recordings of his and Fujii's. But Summer Tree seems ominous, haunted, a contemplation of the arrival of Judgment Day, and the Deity is not happy, like those cyborgs from Hada Hada.