| World Jazz |
Pure Jazz, Pure World, Pure Art: The Uncompromising Dialogue of Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura
Some albums arrive like thunderclaps, designed to stun, overwhelm, and assert their power. Others slip in quietly, as if by stealth, yet leave a deeper impression, like the afterimage of a painting that lingers in your mind long after you’ve walked away from the gallery wall. Ki, the tenth duo recording of pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, belongs firmly to the latter category. Purely jazz, purely world, purely art, this is music stripped to its essence, a meditation on sound and silence where every gesture feels deliberate, uncompromising, and true.
Fujii has long occupied a singular place in modern jazz. For her, composing is not a task but a biological necessity, as essential as breath or heartbeat. Each year, she produces multiple albums, not as an act of repetition but as the inevitable outcome of an unstoppable creative current. Her projects are rarely incidental; every release is a statement, an arrival. Yet Ki marks a turning point, a gesture of accessibility and directness. Here, the music of Tamura, her partner in life and art, takes center stage, and with it comes a new form of openness, as though the pair had decided that in these unsettled years, music must also serve as balm, as grounding force, as reassurance.
The album’s architecture is deceptively simple: seven new works by Tamura, each named for a species of tree, plus one composition by Fujii. The metaphor could not be more fitting. These pieces are rooted, patient, unhurried, their branches stretching in slow arcs across the listening space. Instead of explosive improvisations or rapid-fire interplay, the duo chooses restraint. The entire record is composed of ballads at deliberate tempos, suffused with a hushed, almost ritualistic lyricism. Yet monotony never creeps in. Their mastery lies in the way they carve variety from stillness, in how silence itself becomes a third voice in their dialogue.
What allows such economy to succeed is the intimacy between them. After decades of collaboration, Fujii and Tamura anticipate one another’s movements with the precision of dancers who know the next step before it arrives. Fujii, so often inclined to fracture melodic lines and scatter them into shards, here sculpts phrases with elegance and patience, chiseling beauty from restraint. Tamura, whose trumpet can blaze like a comet, instead softens his tone, rounding the edges, offering sonorities that feel almost tactile, as though brushed into the air with charcoal. The result is not so much a performance as an exhibition, each piece resembling a canvas hung before us. We encounter them as fleeting impressions, and then, slowly, we begin to feel their radiance.
Listeners who know Tamura’s ensemble Gato Libre will recognize echoes of its austere lyricism and hushed intensity. But Ki amplifies those qualities in new ways. “Our last album, Aloft, was improvised,” Fujii recalls. “This time I suggested that Natsuki bring the spirit of Gato Libre into our duo.” Tamura took that invitation and imagined an atmosphere of dignity, “like a person standing upright in pure air,” he explains. Holding on to that vision, he wrote all seven songs in just two days, as if capturing the image before it could dissolve.
For Fujii, embracing this vision meant surrendering part of her usual vocabulary. “It wasn’t easy for me to play less,” she admits. “At first it felt unnatural, almost uncomfortable. But from the first rehearsals, I loved the music.” Before committing it to record, they tested the repertoire in three California concerts, encounters that proved revelatory. “I felt emotions so strong and profound that I can’t even describe them,” Fujii recalls. “It was a new experience for me, not to think about changing tempos or contrasting moods, but simply to inhabit a single atmosphere.”
That atmosphere now pervades Ki. The music hovers between presence and absence, solidity and breath, as though the duo were painting with translucent watercolors rather than oils. Every track offers not only an emotional journey but also a mirror, a chance for listeners to glimpse their own inner landscapes reflected in the music’s surface. And while Fujii’s name has long been synonymous with daring innovation, shattering forms, dissolving boundaries—her choice to place Tamura’s compositions at the center feels like an act of reverence, a tribute to a partner whose voice she values as deeply as her own.
The word Ki itself is multivalent. In Japanese, it can mean energy, spirit, or life force. Here it resounds less as a cry than as a call, a poetic summons to something elemental and shared. Like trees, their title sakes, these pieces stand in quiet dignity, rooted in the earth but reaching for the sky.
In the broader landscape of contemporary jazz, Fujii and Tamura remain outliers, both revered and elusive. Their music resists easy classification: too fluid for strict jazz orthodoxy, too improvisational for classical traditions, too abstract for mainstream world music. And yet, precisely because of this refusal to belong, they have built a space entirely their own, an art form that honors silence as much as sound, intimacy as much as virtuosity, reflection as much as display.
Ultimately, Ki is not about spectacle but about trust, between two artists, between the music and its listeners, between sound and silence. It is a great album from a great composer, and from two musicians who remind us that in art, the deepest truths are often spoken in whispers.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 17th 2025
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Website – Natsuki Tamura
Website – Sakoto Fujii
Musicians :
Natsuki Tamura – trumpet 田村夏樹
Satoko Fujii – piano 藤井郷子
Recorded on July 15, 2025 at Orpheus, Tokyo by Naoto Sugawara
Mixed on July, 2025 by Mike Marciano.
Mastered on July, 2025 by Mike Marciano, Systems Two, NY.
Track Listing:
Keyaki
Sugi
Hinoki
Kusunoki
Arakashi
Icho
Kunugi
Dan’s Oceanside Listening Post (bonus track)