Satoko Fujii's Tokyo Trio Comes to Goshen

Although she is humble, soft spoken and stands barely over 5 feet, it’s easy to be impressed with pianist Satoko Fujii. Over her recording career, which began in 1996 with a two-piano effort with Paul Bley, she has produced over 100 recordings  as a leader. She regularly crisscrosses oceans, performing constantly  in Japan, Europe and North America where her fiercely creative work in settings from solo to big band has been uniformly celebrated by critics and audiences.

On March 31, Fujii made quite the impression on 55 listeners at the Institute For the Musical Arts in Goshen, MA, as she led her Tokyo Trio in an engrossing recital of brand new originals. This concert, part of the Trio’s first North American tour, included stops in Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. The band, featuring Takashi Sugawa on bass and Ittetsu Takemura on drums, has been together for seven years and has three recordings to date, including Dream a Dream, which came out last week. But rather than highlighting music from the new disc, (they played only one piece, “Aruku”), Fujii chose to concentrate on even newer music they’ll record next week in New York. Such is life for the forward thinking, boundlessly energetic 66 year old pianist.

Monday’s concert covered considerable territory, all of it rugged, untamed and breath taking. Delicate moments of calm repose, eerie sounds from inside the piano, and volcanic eruptions of cacophonous energy filled the barn (and those of us in it), with a sense of wonder at the Trio’s virtuosity and spirit of collaboration.

Sections of compositional material featured expectation-defying, pointillistic tutti bursts that crackled and popped.  We moved to the edge of our seats wondering if they could keep the angles together. They nailed endings with the precision of an Olympic gymnast. Other times the threesome floated in a loose configuration that begged the question: written or improvised? They tossed around the spotlight, allowing everybody ample time for unaccompanied soloing. Most of the evening was spent with the musicians in deep, improvised conversation, providing accents, color and commentary. Their confidence in themselves and each other meant we could sit back and marvel at their ease of execution, which translated into what every band aspires to: a true simpatico.

Sugawa and Takemura are more than a generation younger than Fujii. They were clearly thrilled to be sharing the bandstand with her. But she told us how lucky she felt to be playing with them. They are in demand sidemen in Japan.

Takashi Sugawa, 45, is a member of bands led by Terumasa Hino and Sadao Watanabe. Hino, the 82 year old trumpeter, and Watanabe, the 92 year old saxophonist, are among the most celebrated jazz musicians in Japan. Educated at Berklee and mentored by Masabumi Kikuchi, Sugawa lives in Tokyo where he leads his Banksia Trio. His technique, both pizzicato and with bow, was impeccable, and at times produced sounds that resembled a human voice or an electronic instrument. Saxophonist Jason Robinson, who recently returned from a tour of Japan, mentioned how most bass players he encountered had the same long hair as Sugawa. What does that mean?

Born in Sapporo in 1989, Ittetsu Takemura has been a professional musician since he graduated junior high school. Like Sugawa, he is also a veteran of Sadao Watanabe’s band, as well as a member of ensembles led by Kosuke Mine and Fumio Itabashi. Wearing a suit, polo shirt and sneakers without socks, Takemura cut a cool figure. His precise and expansive drumming was equally striking. He played with great dynamic range while never overplaying. Like his rhythm mate, he was intimate with the material and it showed in the execution.

Utilizing the entire keyboard (inside and out), Fujii’s playing was magnificent. She used an e-bow, typically used to vibrate guitar strings, to create synth-like sounds, and used what looked like fishing line to “floss” the strings. She used her forearms on the keys to create density, and played repeated high notes with bell-like effect. She led the band with a light touch, using eye contact and slight head nods to move the music along. In explaining how the music was put together to IMA co-founder June Millington, Sugawa showed her the sheet music. Following Fujii’s lead, they could play the complicated piece through as written, or start at any of its four sections, improvising all the way. For Millington, it was a very different way of organizing music.

I first met Satoko Fujii in 2012, when she performed solo as part of A World of Piano, and then in a memorable Solos & Duos Series concert featuring two couples (Fujii/Natsuki Tamura and Carla Kihlstedt/Matthias Bossi) in a series of four duos. Fujii performed a Jazz Shares concert in Northampton with Joe Fonda in February, 2020, and Priscilla Page and I were witness to the recording of her 100th album,  Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York in 2022. Fujii is an unassuming master, largely unknown among U.S. audiences, but revered by those in the know. She is the right kind of restless and I’m grateful to be in her orbit.  

Possible Sounds : Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds

Just as the group of blind men drew divergent conclusions about elephants after touching particular parts of the animal, jazz means different things to different people, depending on one’s taste and experience. We heard a particular sliver of the diverse world of jazz on March 8, as 35 of us gathered at Holyoke Media to listen to Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds. The quartet: Shragge (trumpet, shakuhachi, effects), Luke Schwartz, (guitar, effects), Deric Dickens (drums) and Damon Banks (bass guitar), took us on an ethereal, 75-minute journey through a sound world inspired by the late Jon Hassell.

Although the music was written by Shragge, the compositions were animated by his love of Hassell’s other-worldly oeuvre. Like Hassell’s vision, Shragge’s music unfurled on a new age wave of electronics. Using two Ableton enabled laptops, beds of synthetic sound made it possible to float easily into a meditative state.

The world of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Ornette felt very far away.

Shragge’s unique Dragon Mouth trumpet, patterned after Maynard Ferguson’s 70s-era prototype called the “Firebird”, is basically a regular valve trumpet with a soprano trombone slide. The slide enables Shragge to emulate bent notes commonly used in North Indian classical vocal music. When combined with the echo, loops and distortions made possible by his electronics, the sound was at once amorphous and enveloping.

Shragge, who has lived in Amherst since 2020, has had an interesting career in music. He has played extensively with guitarist Ben Monder (now part of The Bad Plus), is part of the boundary busting ensemble Brooklyn Raga Massive, was active in the big-tented Festival of New Trumpet, and leads a band that plays the music of Tom Waits. He’s also a licensed music therapist. Shragge’s long-time Zen practice led him to the shakuhachi, an ancient Japanese bamboo flute. Soon after getting to New York, he was handed a shakuhachi by the esteemed teacher, Ronnie Nyogetsu Reishin Seldin, founder and director of the Ki-Sui-An Shakuhachi Dojo. Shragge is now expert on the instrument.

Shragge got to play with Hassell, whose career as a trumpeter and composer intersected with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne and Carl Craig, among many others. This Jazz Shares concert with Whispering Worlds motivated me to pull out my two Jon Hassell records: his 1980 debut, Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, and Flash of the Spirit, his 1987 recording with Farafina, an ensemble of musicians from Burkina Faso. Hassell’s integration of percussion and electronics (Possible Musics featured the brilliant Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos), was mirrored in the work of Whispering Worlds’ Deric Dickens.

Amidst all the swirling, ambient sounds, Dickens acoustic drumming was a grounding force, providing drive and forward momentum. The Brooklyn-based percussionist augmented our Jazz Shares Gretsch Catalina Club kit with a variety of bells and other metal instruments to produce a welcome scaffolding for the atmospherics of the rest of the band. Dickens can be found on stage and recordings with Daniel Carter, Russ Lossing, Caroline Davis and Sara Schoenbeck. His 2011 release, Speed Date, where he invited collaborators like Kirk Knuffke, Matt Wilson, Jeff Lederer and Jeremy Udden to perform with him in duos, is a good place to dive into Dickens work.

Like Dickens, I was meeting guitarist Luke Schwartz for the first time. Both were generous, gracious and extremely talented. Schwartz integrated his articulate guitar lines with his laptop-infused output, resulting in a constant reweaving of the band’s tonal fabric. With its emphasis on layered textures and the engrossing sound environment, Saturday’s concert had the feel of a soundtrack. Schwartz, who was part of guitarist and composer Glenn Branca’s world, has extensive experience in sound design and film scoring. His work with Rick Cox, led to collaboration with the influential Hollywood film composer Thomas Newman, and through them he met and worked with Jon Hassell to help compose a 30-minute piece for sculptor Charles Long that was released on Hassell’s label, Ndeya.

I first crossed paths with electric bassist Damon Banks when Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra and Arun Ramamurthy’s Trio performed in the Valley. I also got to spend time with him when he accompanied his wife, violinist Gwen Laster, when she headlined a Jazz Shares concert in January. He has stayed at our home and become a friend. Banks has a flexible musical mind, ready to provide whatever the moment demands. Although an outsider to Hassell’s world, he certainly is familiar with drones and non-western music through work with Hassan Hakmoun, Arto Lindsay, Angelique Kidjo and Karsh Kale. The Bronx-born, Fisk University educated, Banks has also collaborated with artists as diverse as George Benson, Sekou Sundiata, Wadada Leo Smith and Angela Bofill.

After the gig in Holyoke, Whispering Worlds performed in North Adams, MA and Beacon, NY  celebrating the release of their new recording, Cosmic Cliffs, (Adhyaropa Records). The results, available digitally and on CD, was expertly mixed by Luke Schwartz. It is a fantastic listening experience and an important part of the jazz elephant.

A World of Piano in Three Parts

by Joe Major

February 27-28, March 1, 2025

Northampton Center for the Arts

After a years-long hiatus, A World of Piano marked its third straight festival series at Northampton Center for the Arts. Jazz Shares circuit-goers welcomed the annual three-day return with equal parts heightened anticipation, determined examination and pilgrimage-worthy stamina — qualities that in no small measure were reflected in the solo pianists themselves.

They hailed from a big tent, did practitioners Matthew Shipp, Greg Burk and Sylvie Courvoisier. And from within their improvised music spheres, there existed a consistent wondrous through line of varied probing aspect: from expressive driven intonation to expressive mathematic chordal contortion to expressive check-under-the-hood innards manipulation. Expression reigned.

Night One: Matthew Shipp. Instant ignition. From the opening of the nearly set-long piece that I came to think of as Opus One, Shipp immersed listeners in tumultuous storm-tossed furies. His relentless scrums of muscular glissandos, followed by lulls barely porous enough to allow a recuperative shard of hopeful light to escape, formed a thrum beat of heaving, reluctant elasticity.

With a prospector’s fervor to persist, persist, perchance to comp, perchance to rep, plus a rarely exercised penchant to alight, nothing was safe from his roiling bottom register checklist of assertive edicts, grievances and pronouncements. That rise and fall schematic seemed simple enough, but what sustained it were the intricacies embedded in the full throttle fusillade. There was inevitably an integrated back-channel leverage of chiming, extoling, bursting release — rooting out the verities from the calamitous dross.

A concert comrade of mine mentioned that henceforth he’d “think of piano as a verb.” That’s it; that unfettered, uninhibited, regenerative pianism deployed in the service of translating emotion, and showing your work while doing so. Shipp finished by surfing over and navigating through the mild undulations of a slurred, feathery, ethereal cloud — levitating, as if to suggest there were more tools in his toolbox than just thump widgets. After the set I approached Shipp and deferentially offered that the evening brought to mind the Walt Whitman line, “I contain multitudes.” And to my everlasting delight, Shipp responded, “Huh, I love Whitman!”

Night Two: Greg Burk. Prestidigitation. Many of Burk’s painterly, pastoral compositions were undeniably beauteous; sweeping, lushly saturated soundscapes that belied an inner, angular gravity.  Coursing through his tapestry, a nuanced thread of wariness might be discerned in the otherwise shimmering fabric. His lavish light-fingered classicism was initially overwhelming, sprouting as it did with cascading upper register filigree. On numbers like “Petals on the Water” and a lovely reverent piece dedicated to his mother, Burk subtly transitioned from haltingly articulate, swooning melodic bits to velvety comped pangs of abstraction. Cloaked abstraction, abstraction born of seemingly plain-view lines intersecting with one another in just the right sequences to create an introspective, suddenly outside-of-self otherness.

There was no ambiguation about “Blues for Yusef Lateef.” He opened with a breathy ceremonial-sounding pipe flute meditation that evolved into a jaunty syncopated exploration featuring a rollicking knockabout bottom and a squirrelly high end. The aftermath of the big crescendo led to a leeward slide, a stilted stride-style cadence that never abandoned the look-inside-oneself ethos.

Nor were there any doubts about a couple of outright prancing romps, one of which Burk said was Bird-inspired. Both were replete with pixilated, unabashedly jazzy pokes and runs that, despite the louche aura of the Parker-esque tune, retained a signature Burk sparkle. And both bore the earmarks of Burk architecture; grand archways in which substantive and exquisite chord arrays could investigate.

Two tunes, “Sequoia Song” and “Clean Spring,” swapped out any semblance of the shell game gambit. There were no opaque intentions or quick-look-there legerdemain, and abstraction distractions were vanquished. Instead, a crisp effervescence permeated the joie de la nature; sinewy for one, bubbly for the other. Their straight forward direction lent a dexterous air of dimensional relief to Burk’s work. And to my ear, wispy hints of Abdullah Ibrahim only added resonant grace to the performance.

Night Three: Sylvie Courvoisier. Avant-garde acoustic bric a brac boutique. En garde! Buckle up! Courvoisier’s set was a riveting, careening tour through what essentially amounted to her sound sculpture. She staged the piano so that it was chockablock with hardware items, whimsical trinkets and everyday jetsam, integrating the resulting sonic effects with her oft measured, oft rampant keyboard trajectories. It was a curated exploration of the symbiotic string/soundboard relationship.

The sounds — from ticks and tocks, to clinks and clunks, to harmonic drone-like vibration, to the anvil-like thunk of her elbow on the keys — cleaved to her demonstrative, fervent, asymmetrical piano playing. But beyond that, the whole enterprise writ large sought to find and develop a cohesive, viable syntax for this ungainly, instantly-appearing piano language.

There were four forays. The first was a stringy pluck-and-play that alternately veered from progressions of thunder and lull into rivulets of tinny pie plate-sounding classical, jazzy-tempo jive, and sacred temple tonalities. She paced herself with some near-ragtime, near-stride, and then, like a Dave Burrell, she’d succumb to out of the blue chaotic spasms of abstraction and distraction. Her piano-speak concoctions were punctuated with violent black hole implosions, leaving gaping, gulping voids of finality. Another piece began with Flight of the Bumblebee flurry and then wavered from mid-tempo contemplation to a bluesy dissonance segment where her right hand felt free to scatter at will. Crescendo, climax, calm wake, then seismometer-worthy Mach 1 boom!

A third sortie gave the accoutrements a real workout, with the piano strings getting a rhythmic knocking, punching, pinching, vibrating and tingling. That grew into a legit rippling jazzy riff that in turn devolved into particles and shards. Some low-end pirouettes gave lyricism to strains of an old blues that was forgotten but was there all the time. Finally, the last number pulled out all the stops, or more precisely, unloaded the whole gadget shopping cart as Courvoisier geared up to peak arpeggio power and melded noise and, oh yeah, notes. It had a lopsided, loopy gait; kind of a stride-akimbo, teetering imbalance that eventually found its legs and, as unadorned piano, flared brightly. Intense rolls, runs and slides; chrysanthemum flourish; sudden stop, and out. There was a brief encore duet with her touring and recording partner, clarinetist Ned Rothenberg. They performed a layered, sensitive peekaboo/hide and seek interplay that featured his extraordinary circular breathing and referenced the earlier coalescence-seeking syntactical togetherness that resided in the heart of her whole customized endeavor.

Following Nights: Epilogue. The Northampton Center for the Arts is not set in 490 CE Marathon, and I did not run home twenty plus miles to Athens, or even my corner of Western Massachusetts, to convey news of a victorious battle — yet my takeaway from this three-prong music marathon, these creative front lines, is just as endearingly momentous. Attaining zero-degrees-of-separation proximity to artists of this echelon is in itself a triumphant privilege. Their poignant commitment to craft, and their zealous shielding of personal inner vision, is resolute enough, by extension, to bolster tribes of attentive listeners.