Kitsune-Bi

Kitsune-Bi

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
A young Japanese player with chops to burn and a vibrant, post-Cecil Taylor-style imagination, Satoko Fujii has a fantastic feel for the pacing and drama of headstrong piano jazz. This set is made up of duos and trios with drummer Jim Black, bassist Mark Dresser, and soprano saxophonist Sachi Hayasaka. Black's rattle trap drumming is an excellent foil for Fujii's dense pianism, her love of the bellowing low end on the keyboard. And Dresser extends the harmonic searching, proving himself ever the multifaceted player who can bow his bass into a singing frenzy and plunk it into a rhythmic steam. Fujii plays jumping lines and calmly dropped clusters around the whole affair, as if the setting were ideal for her to engage each player on terms unique to the instrument. The sound is lovely and wide open, and this might be one of Tzadik Records' best forays into the "New Japan" scene that has become one of label founder John Zorn's main inspirations. --Andrew Bartlett

From Jazziz
It seems appropriate to consider pianist Satoko Fujii in the wake of a hurricane, given that her music so often expresses itself in torrents. Though her most famous teacher is the celebrated and cerebral Paul Bley, Fujii is an instrumentalist in the joyfully aggressive mode of Cecil Taylor.

She can tear into even the most deftly packaged melody the way a child tears into a brightly wrapped birthday present: headlong, hungry, unstoppable. Also like Taylor, she requires of her accompanists equal parts sensitivity and adventurousness. Fujii's Buell Neidlinger is the unflappable bassist Mark Dresser, who can follow her rubato statements arco (see "This Is the Thing That I Have Forgotten") with an exactitude available to only the most experienced of artists. Together with Dresser and the limber, young drummer Jim Black, Fujii has created in this, her fourth release as a leader, a musical statement both intense and invigorating.

Looking Out of the Window contains seven Fujii compositions, which display a range of effects: Monk-ish, step-wise left-hand work pinions tornadic right-hand figurations in "City Life," while "210" suggests the sound of complex architectural systems collapsing, the unfolding of some explosive chain reaction. "Yad Nus" features the kind of constellated patterns in uncertain tonality that listeners might most associate with the work of composer Morton Feldman, though more densely constructed, lacking Feldman's impressions of infinite space. "The Sun Was Yellow" is perhaps most distinctive for Black's deconstructed rock drumming. Oddly, the title cut is the least successful performance on the CD, as it foregrounds an annoyingly insistent figure that suggests nothing so much as the key phrase of Barbra Streisand's insufferable "People."

All told, Fujii's CD is both successful on its own terms and suggestive of even more impressive work to come.

Kitsune-Bi,Satoko Fujii,Tzadik,Avant-Garde Jazz,Free Jazz,Japan,Jazz,Jazz Music,Pop

Jazz Music: Kitsune-Bi

Jazz Music: