Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii came about this the hard way. That is, she started playing the way you're supposed to: learning etudes, playing scales, practicing all the correct fingerings, being as precise as humanly possible. It's enough to drive you mad, and I suppose that explains why so many concert pianists have hair like Dudley Moore and talk like... well, Dudley Moore. Fujii started down this path, only to hit a brick wall about 20 years into the game. So, she gave it up for communal stomp-n-yell sessions and cathartic group improv. The end.
Nope. After a year of gathering her wits, she decided jazz was where it was at, and returned to her studied piano with a different aim. She went back to taking lessons, but this time with renowned Japanese jazz pianist Fumio Itabashi. Of course, her parents didn't approve of the new direction, so Fujii struck out on her own. She eventually left for America, to study at Berklee College of Music, graduating in 1987. She went back to Japan, and made a humble rep by playing in jazz clubs and on television and commercial soundtracks. The end.
Not quite. A few years later, Fujii was accepted to the New England Conservatory of Music, from which she received a Graduate Degree in Jazz Performance in 1996. There, she had the opportunity to learn from greats like Paul Bley, Cecil McBee and George Russell. Her first album even featured Bley, and many had a difficult time recognizing who was playing at what point, such was her stylistic advancement. Today, having worked with new jazz luminaries like Mark Dresser, Jim Black, Mark Feldman, and big bands from both New York and Japan, Fujii is recognized as one of the greatest Japanese jazz musicians alive. And she is living happily ever after. The end.
But this is not the end. The deal is, despite the ridiculous amount of jazz preparation and education Fujii seems to have had, her latest release, Vulcan, barely sounds like jazz at all. What's the story? You'd think that when your biggest reference points are supposed to be folks like Bley and Myra Melford that your album wouldn't initially remind you of avant-proggers like the Soft Machine or the Muffins (Cuneiform Records: check 'em). We're talking extra-hard drumming and improv that often is so off the beaten path I keep waiting for the quartet (Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, bassist Takeharu Hayakawa, and drummer-god Tatsuya Yoshida) to implode rather than work through the storms, and come out standing, as they do like clockwork every time. And this is most certainly not an end, but yet another incredible beginning from Fujii.
Vulcan begins with the epic "The Sun in a Moonlight Night" and Yoshida's guttural shaman vocals, accompanied by Tamura's electric/underwater horn and some elastic bass fingerprints scattered here and there. Soon, Fujii joins the mini-ruckus by pretending to be Cecil Taylor for a time, though always in the background. So, yes, this is what they call "free jazz," or in some quarters, "noodling." But then a funny thing happens: Yoshida drops a beat, and Fujii drops a riff, and it becomes what they call "super-rock." And it remains this for a whole two minutes or so before changing into a number from Bizet's Carmen (if it was a bass solo). Then, Yoshida crashes through the wall where most jazz drummers would "hint at pulse" or "play around time" or some such non-jam strategy. Soon, it's Fujii taking the solo over the massive beats and bass bombs. And then it's Tamura (Fujii's husband) soloing, and-- wait, did that solo section last about ten minutes without me even once looking at my watch? Yes, yes it did. At the end, they come back to the head, and this is why it's easy to tell people 15-minute tunes aren't necessarily bad.
"Incident" begins like a lopsided Jackson Pollock painting; all scribble haze impressions and stop/start horn utterances with bass and erratic drumming. Then, the "song" proper starts, though the head is arguably even less stable than the exposition, with the beat changing as often as the notes in the melody. It's sometimes difficult to tell where the soloing starts and the melody begins, but that doesn't keep the tune from jamming, if only in the abstract-dyslexia jam sense.
Another punchy bass solo begins "Ninepin," and just like before, it seems to only obscure the true intentions of this tune. Soon, the solo falls onto a pedal note, and Yoshida ushers in his ominous toms and cymbals. Fujii enters with a vaguely Eastern European head, doubled by Tamura. This is something like that made famous by the NYC clique-mongers John Zorn (with Masada) and Chris Speed (solo and with Pachora), but a sight more rock where theirs was stark swinging and even harmelodic. Here, after a lengthy group exposition, Fujii solos over a relatively restrained (though increasingly kinetic as it progresses) backdrop, and it can still be said that Yoshida is the world's most hyperactive drummer. In fact, soon his cymbal rolls and snare blasts dominate the section--] so much so that the tune morphs into a drum solo. Without launching into a treatise on the greatness of Yoshida, I will say that even after a decade of incredible Ruins' releases, his playing here is surprisingly fresh, both in its single-minded forcefulness, and by the way he effortlessly shifts back into the main head of the tune.
"Footstep" and "Neko no Yume" are both quieter entries on a release that seems to specialize in that which pounds and sprawls. The former features dark, atmospheric playing from Fujii over light cymbal work and bowed bass howls in the distance, and it probably wouldn't sound out of place in a tense ghost story soundtrack. The latter is more straightforward, with Tamura and Hayakawa playing the real late-night, smoky jazz dope Chet Baker gets so much credit for (when it was probably Miles Davis all along). In any case, the tune reminds me of nobody so much as Dave Douglas (though Tamura doesn't quite possess his technical facility), particularly in its juxtaposition of classic cool with modern squawk.
The rest of Vulcan is devoted to much more aggressive aesthetics: "LH Fast" is Ruins-style jump-cut avant-rock; "Untitled" fools you into thinking it will be an introspective piano ballad, but is in fact an extroverted, Iberian-flavored romp. And the last tune, "Junction," spells out to anyone who wasn't paying attention that this album is about fast and loud jams. Of course, an hour of that can become taking to the ears, and it helps that these guys bring it all back home fairly quickly in the tunes more often than not.
This quartet has been playing live together since 1998, and it'll be interesting to see if they continue to release stuff together. There are very few working jazz groups that demand the attention of the rock audience at the moment. This is certainly no slight on today's jazz artists, but it would seem that the demographic gap between jazz and rock is bigger than it was, say, 25 years ago. Fujii is one of a handful of artists (including the aforementioned Zorn, Black, Speed, and Douglas) who would seem to have as many potential fans in the rock world as jazz. Things like raw energy and inspiration have never been exclusive to any musical genre, and it would be a shame if the inspired creativity I hear on this album was only heard by a few jazz critics and Japanese music fans.
