Satoko Fujii & Joe Fonda: Thread Of Light

Music finds a way. The potentially deadly Covid-19 virus and the quarantines cannot stop it; they cannot even slow it down. Resourceful artists continue to create, and pianist Satoko Fujii and bassist Joe Fonda continue to be perhaps the most resourceful and creative voices out there.

Thread of Light, the Fujii/Fonda teaming's fifth album release, came about in a way unlike anything they had done together before. Stymied by the quarantine, Fonda emailed Fujii and expressed his frustrations with the situation, and Fujii filled him in on her new way of music making: file swapping with collaborators oceans away, playing together via the internet, recording solo and duo albums, the duos with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, her husband, in their apartment in Kobe, Japan, and posting a good deal of this-recording-from-home music on Bandcamp.

A light must have popped on in Fonda's head after his Fujii-inspired trip to Bandcamp, where he found a Fujii solo set entitled Step On Thin Ice (2021). Deep listening to the music told him he could do something with it, with his bass. Fujii must have agreed. The result is Thread Of Light, featuring Fonda's deeply considered contributions to Fujii's solo set.

Fonda has always been an in-the-moment improviser, listening and reacting at the highest level with his fellow music makers in groups such as the OBJG Quartet, Barry Altschul's 3Dom Factor, the Anthony Braxton Sextet and, since 2015, with Satoko Fujii, so how does he react to a set-in-digital-stone format of Fujii's solo work? Comparing it to Fonda's past work with Fujii—Four (2019), Mizu (2018), Triad (2018) and Duet (2015), all on Long Song Records—says that Thread Of Light surpasses (no easy task) those previous efforts; it is the best, most engaging music to date by the Fonda Fujii teaming. Why? Maybe the template of the spacious solo piano set, combined with the time allowed for study and consideration of additions and embellishments, makes for a clearer focus?

Fonda sounds as if he has steeped himself in profundity. If Fujii's piano is the stars, Fonda's bass is the fecund, muddy biomass baking in the sun at the bottom of a shallow lagoon—an impression from the set's opener, "Kochi." Its follow-up, "Fallen Leaves Dance" features Fujii at her most exuberant, with Fonda trying to tether her down, and "Reflection" sounds like a "beyond time" rumination of the mysterious workings of the universe.

This is how Fonda and Fujii roll.