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Satoko Fujii: Dream a Dream
Satoko Fujii
pianob.1958
Takashi Sugawa
bassIttetsu Takemura
drumsRecorded during a European tour, the day before the trio's performance at the 2024 Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival, the session captures a band in mid-flight—seasoned by the road, yet still nimble and exploratory. Fujii's five charts offer just enough scaffolding for collective invention. While many of her customary hallmarks are apparent—the intricate unisons, the precipitate starts and stops, the canny use of space—she sets them within a more improvisatory framework than many of her projects. Passages of hushed timbral interchange and prickly texture vie with flashes of high drama. Her writing here avoids familiar jazz tropes—no vamped figures or looping motifs. Instead, fragments appear, vanish and re- emerge, as if glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
Sugawa and Takemura bring an unruly attitude, even as they buy into Fujii's idiosyncratic universe, and she gives them ample opportunity to dive deep into the weeds, often unescorted. As a consummate improviser herself, no stranger to such pursuits, she responds by delving under the lid of the piano to extract unlikely but apt sonorities. But her presence is not everywhere as elusive. She opens the album alone, clanking, soaring, and shuddering with dynamic contrasts, in a statement of intent. As it continues, "Second Step" threads together solo episodes for each member with crisp accords and conversational interplay.
She creates settings that expose the mercurial talents of her crew in the best possible light. As a case in point, the multifaceted title track unfolds with painterly patience. Fujii and Sugawa often move in tandem—tracing outlines more than delivering lines—while the pianist allows Takemura free rein for his tonal investigations. As a consequence, here and elsewhere, he becomes less a timekeeper than a textural colorist, expanding the trio's palette with every phrase.
What defines Dream A Dream is not its heft but its intimacy. Fujii writes as a composer who knows when to let go, trusting her collaborators to bridge the gaps. But with a restraint that means that in this trio, even silence sometimes finds a voice. ">
Track Listing
Second Step; Dream a Dream; Summer Day; Rain Drop; Aruku.
Personnel
Album information
Title: Dream a Dream | Year Released: 2025 | Record Label: Libra Records
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