Natsuki Tamura / Satoko Fujii / Ramon Lopez: Yama Kawa Umi

In a nearly thirty-year career, Satoko Fujii (pianist, bandleader, composer, provocateur, sonic experimenter in the first degree) has shown herself to be one of the most daring and uncompromising artists in music. In a way, she is like Thelonious Monk in that—upon an initial experience with Monk's music (and Fujii's)—the uninitiated may not know quite what to make of what they are hearing, because neither of these artists follows a rule book. They were/are themselves. Best advice to those unfamiliar: let go and listen

Fujii's album count now exceeds one hundred releases. These are real hold-in-your-hand CDs with beautiful cover art. She has not gone into the streaming thing in any big way. Yama Kawa Umi (Japanese for "Mountain River Sea") finds her in cahoots with her marital and musical cohort, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and drummer Ramón López, following up with this particular trio's (she has many) second go around, after 2020's Mantle (Not Two Records)—review here.

Yama Kawa Umi bursts into existence with an assault, up in the "Headwaters," a wild tumult of three-way interplay that sounds like the two hockey teams mixing it up after the gloves have come off and the players are swinging freely. This lasts less than a minute. Then things get ruminative, and Fujii's introspective reverie replaces the chaos. Drummer Lopez enters, as does Tamura, with deliberative contributions that gather momentum in the direction of the combustible.

Fujii is known for her bombast and hard rock power on albums like 2024's Dog Days Of Summer (Libra Records)—review here. She is also known for her compositional twists and turns and changing momentums and moments of exquisite beauty. That is what we have here—the opening melee aside. Moments of shadowy foreboding creep in; Tamura blows into extended technique rants that make perfect sense in the contexts of the assertive drum work and muscular, freewheeling piano that pounds in an elliptical orbit around him.

And so goes another attempt to describe the indescribable: Satoko Fujii's sound world, in this case an album that is in part a suite composed around the workings of a river that begins in the mountains, in the tumultuous "Headwaters," sparkles along its journey, spreading out into pensive segments in the flatter sections along the way and continues on, relentless in its examination of shifting mood and tempos while it obeys the inevitability of gravity and finds the sea.