Search - Satoko Fujii :: Kitsune-Bi

Soundtrack to a Life

waldglyde | Sydney, New South Wales Australia | 04/05/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Good music, whether it's a song by the most disposable of pop, or a symphony by Mahler, lives through its ready incorporation into the lives of those who do not merely 'love' it, but come to 'live' it. Satoko Fujii's 'Kitsune-Bi'is, as instrumental jazz, perhaps more readily assimilable than most, and like a soundtrack it is obtrusive enough to underpin and emphasise, but not to dominate. By this I do not mean to suggest it is dinner party music, inane and ignorable. Instead, it is a soundtrack for imagined films, or films of life as we perceive it. And like life it is unpredicatble, prone to sudden changes of direction, and it is passionate, playful, at times disturbing. It is this very quality, driven by Fujii's striking piano, that makes it like all great jazz, and music in general, obedient to its own patterns of advance and reversal, marked by associations that seem at times dissonant, but at other times the only possible turn. In short, it is like thought, like dialogue, we must do some of the work here, like an instrument ourselves, and each listening, because we are at each moment a different person, is a new improvisation upon set lines. The album, like her past work, is a masterpiece of genre-hopping within cool and free jazz, postmodern chamber, even torch-song traditions. Underpinning the most timeless of understatements, and breaking out at unpredictable moments, is a fiercely experimental approach to rhythm and musicality. 'Drops' has a shimmering, gauzy quality, for instance, almost like Messiaen in its pianism, stretched over a tense and shifting rhythm, but with the instruments shifting in and out of the roles of skeleton and flesh - piano overbass and drums, bass over piano and drums. 'Sounds of Stone', a bravura piano solo, twists between Glass, Monk, Chopin and Schoenberg, almost from note to note. A work of consistent beauty and sustained musical imagination, Fujii's hypnotic 'Kitsune-Bi'asserts that vital quality at the core of the human spirit - creativity - at the same time as it is coloured with some of the darkness that makes that creativity seem even more vital. If the soundtrack helps to focus us, as we fill in the plotlines our lives, it will sound a lot like this."