Think of Lionel Hampton’s bright streaks enlivening Charles Mingus’ late 1970s vamps, the sly warmth Teddy Charles brought to Miles Davis’ Blue Moods, the titillating sonic vertebrae various members of Tortoise added to albums like TNT and Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Such is the lot of the vibraphone, that of a supporting instrument regularly submerged by voices, guitars, strings, horns, and drums. The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to this notion. While collaborative releases with German experimentalist Jan Jelinek and from his El Fog solo project filtered his lithe performance through a sieve of effects, the two albums Fujita has issued under his own name—2013’s Stories and 2015’s Apologues—promote a soaring classical purity, as though by rejecting electronic interference, he’s learning how to stay out of his own way.
By turns jaunty, shrill, and subdued, Stories found cellist Arturo Martínez Steele and Tangerine Dream violinist Hoshiko Yamane accompanying Fujita. The pair return for Apologues, joined by accordion player Motomitsu Maehara, snare drummer Masaya Hijikata, French horn player Tomonobu Odai, clarinetist Yoko Ozawa, and flautist Mio Suzuki. The collaborators’ massed whorls—tender, nuanced—act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita’s playing, which invariably conveys a startled, improvisatory sense of wonder.
Awe and sorrow wash through opener "Tears of Unicorn" in equal, alternating measure, as strings saw-circle a series of melodic constellations so impeccably gorgeous that they ache; blink and you’ll miss the fleeting quote of "London Bridge Is Falling Down". As Fujita metes out tight, teasing trills on "Moonlight", strings yawn as woodwinds pipe along in harmony. "Puppet’s Strange Dream Circus Band" and "Flag" introduce perceptible jolts of urgency, with the former favoring a courtly, in-the-round gait and the latter’s sleeting tones and orchestral sweep midwifing a thrilling friction. An outlier, "Beautiful Shimmer" swaddles a spare Fujita motif in waves of reverb.
A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues—the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play. It’s not whimsy exactly, but an anesthetizing innocence primed for comfort and nostalgia alike—savvier, music-box sweetness summoned into being by a vibraphonist.
