Rubble and rock
The bands in Detroit – amid the hype and attention – are getting drunk, playing music, and having a whole lot of fun.
By Jimmy Draper

Detroit Bands
By Jimmy Draper

Tongue untied
Satoko Fujii frees her mind – and the music follows.
By Derk Richardson

No rhinestones, ever
There's no glitter on roots singer-songwriters Kim Richey and Hazel Dickens.
By Kimberly Chun

Correct Techniques
Connections
By Mosi Reeves

Tongue untied

Satoko Fujii frees her mind – and the music follows.

By Derk Richardson

PIANIST-COMPOSER Satoko Fujii grew up speaking Japanese, and her English is pretty good too. But neither language is up to the job of describing her music.

For one thing, no one has yet coined an adequate term for the music that evolved out of the so-called free jazz of the late 1960s and early '70s. Some, following the lead of the Chicago avant-garde players who founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), favor "creative music," a label with about as much specific descriptive potency as "experimental." It's kind of like calling a breakfast cereal "all-natural."

The Bay Area's Rova Saxophone Quartet, who are bringing Fujii and her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, to San Francisco as the featured guest artists of Rovaté 2002, Oct. 11 and 12, have tried to fit "comprovisation" around their ambitious sonic palette. But the linguistic fusion feels far more awkward than the sax foursome's actual melding of composition and improvisation.

Fujii finds herself at a loss when it comes to naming what she plays. "I'd like to know myself," she says with a self-conscious laugh.

Since she started recording in 1996, Fujii has given observers plenty of evidence from which to draw their own conclusions. With 14 CDs under own name, she has averaged slightly more than two releases a year, including the new Bell the Cat! (Tokuma Japan), a trio date with bassist Mark Dresser and percussionist Jim Black; duo CDs with Tamura as well as violinist Mark Feldman; two quartet recordings; and orchestral albums.

As a genre reference, jazz is the most obvious starting point. Because she plays piano in a freewheeling harmony-fracturing style that ranges from spare and meditative to dense and agitated, Fujii has been compared to everyone from Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, and Abdullah Ibrahim to Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, and Marilyn Crispell. If you cling to those allusions, you can find reinforcement for them on various passages of Bell the Cat!, but you'd also have to account for the traces of Thelonious Monk on "Get Along Well With ...," the measured, Satie-like patterns of "Foot Step," and the prepared piano that creates a gamelan-like clamor conjoined with Black's percussion on "Champloo."

Fujii's orchestral compositions and arrangements may bear some relationship to those of George Russell and Gil Evans, but they are marked by her own unusual conceptions of cross-rhythm and counterpoint, her interest in bent pitches and akimbo tonalities, and her elastic approach to time ("time is a line but it is also a spot," she has said), as well her willingness to grant her players great liberties with the score for the sake of personal expression.

Neither Fujii's piano playing nor her big band writing will ever be confused with that of the most famous female Japanese artist in jazz, Toshiko Akiyoshi. Fujii agrees. "As a Japanese woman, I really respect her," she says of the veteran orchestra leader. "But we are very different musically. I think she's jazz. I am not a straight-ahead jazz musician, but people still categorize me as a jazz musician."

Last May, Fujii and Tamura visited the Bay Area to meet with Rova about the upcoming Rovaté collaboration and to perform in the first SFAlt Festival. During their duo set at the Musicians Union Hall, the pianist and trumpeter explored a stunning variety of individual instrumental timbres and attacks and interwoven textures and moods. Stylistically spanning a spectrum of musical history that includes trumpeters Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Lester Bowie, and Toshinori Kondo and pianists Bill Evans, Jaki Byard, Herbie Hancock, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Matthew Shipp, their long continuous piece was a far cry from another piano-trumpet duet, the legendary 1928 "Weather Bird" collaboration by Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong. It was equally distant, in conception if not in time, from the training Fujii experienced in Japan.

From classical to unclassifiable

Fujii's transformation from the classical pianist she was for 16 years, from the age of four, into the unclassifiable artist she is today began with an urge to improvise. She wanted to return to the uninhibited feeling she knew as a child before her playing was tethered to the page. But she discovered she couldn't improvise at all. "I got tired playing written music, and I began to doubt whether that's my music or not," Fujii explains, "but I found out I cannot improvise without any music paper in front of me. I couldn't make even one note."

She took the extreme measure of abandoning the piano altogether. "The thing I tried at first sounds very strange to you probably," she says. "I began to sing and hit things, making noise without any musical instrument, and getting people to do the same thing together in a group. We didn't use any musical instruments, just improvised. I could be much more free without a piano."

But when she returned to the piano, hoping to transfer her rediscovered sense of freedom to the keyboard, Fujii still felt bound to predetermined patterns. Inspired in part by Koji Taku, a classical pianist and composer who at the age of 60 resigned from the Tokyo College of Art and Music to play jazz, Fujii turned for inspiration to the American music that had given rise to swing and bebop.

She studied privately with Fumio Itabashi, who had performed with drummer Elvin Jones and trombonist Ray Anderson, and, against her parents' wishes, left home and supported herself as a house pianist in a Tokyo cabaret. "I was a very, very, very bad pianist," Fujii says. "I didn't know anyone who was worse than me. People said wait five or six months, you'll be fine. Nothing happened. I thought maybe being in school would help me. I thought I should make some effort before I gave up."

In 1985 she applied and received a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Although she graduated magna cum laude in 1987, she looks back on her Berklee years with mixed feelings. The arranging skills she learned from trumpeter Herb Pomeroy provided the crucial foundation for her later orchestrations, but as a pianist Fujii felt like she was being herded into emulating such keyboard giants of jazz as Wynton Kelly and Chick Corea rather than being encouraged to find her own voice on the instrument. "I couldn't play like Herbie Hancock or McCoy Tyner or anyone else," she explains, "so I couldn't be a good student in that way."

Fujii also suffered a bad case of culture shock during her U.S. stay. "When I got to this country, in the very beginning I hated everything in this culture. I didn't even want to talk in English for more than one year," she recalls.

But when she developed tonsillitis and had to be hospitalized for surgery, she was forced to communicate in English. The experience made her more amenable to the American way of life. "Then I began to love everything in this country and hate everything in Japan," she says.

After Berklee, Fujii returned to Japan for six years, performing in jazz clubs and hotel lounges, teaching at the Yamaha Popular Music School, and recording commercial music for film, television, and a software corporation. "I was not sure what I wanted to do, so I tried anything," she says.

Instant enlightenment

Another scholarship, this time to the New England Conservatory of Music, brought her back to the United States. Her second stint in academia proved more rewarding. In the Third Stream Department, she studied composition with George Russell, the pianist and theorist who wrote The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization and counted Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy and Carla Bley among his students. When she realized pianist Paul Bley was also teaching at the conservatory, Fujii switched her major to jazz so she could concentrate on developing as an improviser.

"So many things I got from him," she says of Bley. "Through him, I really understood that I could be myself. I began to have confidence to be myself. It was a big thing for me, because I had a hard time being myself. I could release."

Fujii felt transformed by her work with Bley, as if she'd undergone an instantaneous enlightenment that required no intellectual struggle with ideas and concepts. Instead of practicing to master chords and riffs, she learned to let musical notions arise of their own accord and then run with them as her muse spontaneously dictated. The graduate diploma in jazz performance she received from the New England Conservatory in 1996 was secondary to the confidence she gained in her own instincts.

Fujii wasted no time expressing her newfound musical identity. The same year she graduated from the conservatory, she recorded her first CD, Something about Water, featuring piano duets with Bley, for the Libra label. That opened the floodgates. She followed her debut with a solo album, Indication (Libra), and in short order the duet album with Tamura, How Many? (Leo Lab), her piano trio debut, Looking out of the Window (Nippon Crown), and her inaugural orchestral CD, South Wind (Leo Lab).

"I'm addicted [to making records]," Fujii admits. "And all formats that I do make different fun for me. That's why I can't stop doing any of them. I have to do everything."

She is undaunted by the limited record sales that cause her to play a game of musical chairs from one record company to another. Besides Libra, Leo Lab, and Tokuma Japan, Fujii's recordings have appeared on Enja, Buzz, Ewe, and John Zorn's Tzadik. "As soon as a label makes my CD," she half-jokes, "they find out they cannot sell any of them."

In 1996 Fujii first crossed paths with Rova, witnessing the quartet's concerts in New York City and London. Three years later, Rova – Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams – performed in Tokyo, and discussions about a collaboration began.

Ochs and Fujii compared notes on the differences between Japanese and American musicians. "Especially I found that sax players are different," the pianist says. "That was very interesting to me. Japanese sax players who I play with got their big influence from the free jazz in the '60s, and Larry said that sax players in the States got various influences from different things like contemporary classical music, free jazz, and world music, and they combine that kind of stuff."

Fujii investigated the divergences more closely in the fall of 1997, when she recorded Double Take, an unprecedented two-CD set in which the Satoko Fujii Orchestra East (in a concert hall in Okegawa, Japan) and the Satoko Fujii Orchestra West (a month later in a New York City studio) each recorded Fujii's "South Wind" and "Ruin" suite, among other pieces. "They sound completely different," Fujii says, "but if I could say how in words, then I don't need to make records."

It was her recorded output that first brought Fujii to the attention of Ochs. "I think the first recordings I heard were the trio CDs with Dresser and Black, which made it really clear that she could write and play," he says, "and that her 'sensibility' was to the left or liberal side of jazz, where more was allowed in: bebop and beyond rather than bebop and before."

Ochs is always on the lookout for musicians who can bring new compositions and intriguing instrumental colors into the large-scale collaborative projects that Rova has been organizing for nearly 20 years. As he listened to more of Fujii's recordings, Ochs became more convinced that Fujii's musical worldview overlapped with Rova's.

"They all indicated someone with an open ear, someone who composed from her imagination rather than from some set of jazz rules," he says. "When we met, it was even clearer that I wanted to try to get a collaboration together. She obviously was a listener, and in conversation, it was clear she was someone who thought about the big picture and the history of improvised music."

Since 1999 Rova has marshaled its most ambitious collaborations into the annual productions it calls Rovaté, the name deriving from the group's 1978 debut LP, Cinema Rovaté. Previous contributors have included Sam Rivers and John Schott. "It's about 'joining forces' more than it is about commissioning a piece of music," Ochs says.

Fujii has composed five new pieces for Rovaté 2002: two ("15 Minutes to Get to the Station" and "Empty Bottles and Apples") to infuse "extreme craziness" and the suggestion of "no connection, no sense" into what she describes as the sax quartet's "beautiful sense of ensemble harmony"; and three ("A Lion in Your Bag," "A Zebra on Your Roof," and "An Alligator in Your Wallet") to convey the impression of "unexpected discoveries" for a specially assembled Orkestrova composed of Rova, New York City bassist Ken Filiano, and a host of resident Bay Area musicians, including trumpeter Darren Johnston, trombonists Mike Vlatkovich and Tom Yoder, drummer Scott Amendola, and Tin Hat Trio violinist Carla Kihlstedt. Fujii will also engage Kihlstedt in a series of duets.

In a sense, every piece involving Fujii and Tamura will be a kind of duet – between cultures. Fujii is a great believer in and practitioner of music as a universal and inclusive vocabulary. "The most interesting thing for me is that it's very easy to be with musicians in any culture," she says. "It doesn't matter which country, we can communicate. Probably we do have a certain sense of making something together.

"Many people think we have to understand different cultures, but I think it's impossible," she continues. "I think we just have to understand that there is a difference, and if I don't compare, nothing is wrong. Sometimes now I cannot even remember where I am, but I can relax and we can communicate very well even without language."

Rovaté 2002 runs Fri/11-Sat/12, 8 p.m. (Sat/12 show preceded by a Composers Forum conversation with Satoko Fujii and Steve Adams at 7 p.m.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission, S.F. $20-$35, $18 for seniors and students. (415) 978-ARTS or (415) 487-1701.