Satoko Fujii’s “Altitude 1100 Meters”

The peripatetic 66-year-old pianist and composer Satoko Fujii is known as much for her prolific output as for her wide-ranging musical interests. The albums she has issued in her career under her own name now number more than 100. During 2018, she celebrated her 60th birthday by releasing a new CD every month. Her production hasn’t slowed much since then — if you’re trying to keep up, best to check out the latest release now, because in a matter of months there’s bound to be another.

Production has not inhibited quality. Fujii’s output includes solo piano, trios, quartets, and other small ensembles (including an “avant-rock quartet”) and big bands, in formats that encompass free-jazz hurricanes and detailed written compositions (sometimes in the same piece), tonal trance-like meditations, and spikey declamations. I have not consumed all of Fujii’s output, but everything I’ve heard has been worth repeated listening.

Fujii studied at Berklee in the late ’80s and, a few years later, at New England Conservatory, where an important mentor was Paul Bley. Since then, she has moved back to Japan, where she assembles various groups, often working with her husband, the trumpeter Natsuki Tamura.

Her Altitude 1100 Meters (Libra), released January 24, is her first composed for multiple strings, with her ensemble GEN (“string,” in Japanese). It’s an album-length suite, in five parts, for two violins, viola, bass, piano, drums, and electronics, divided into portions of the day, from early morning to twilight, inspired by a time she spent in the mountains of Nagano. Though it would be easy to hear the piece as a musical landscape, Fujii says in the press notes that “the music isn’t meant to be a musical picture of the mountain landscape at different times of day. It’s about how the air made me feel at those times.”

The effect, if not one of Fujii’s more carefully calibrated compositions, is one of the most detailed and beautiful I’ve heard. Fujii chose players with background as improvisers, but the adjustment of textures and dynamics all have the inevitably of planned events. The opening “Morning Haze” is introduced by a bowed bass drone, joined after about a half-minute by intermittent string glissandi, sliding up and down the scale, and then interjections of soft drum mallets and splashes of cymbal, then some rattling percussion.

The spaciousness, the stillness, of that opening section, and the gradual accretion of minute details suggest another sort-of landscape piece, Charles Ives’s “Central Park in the Dark,” as well as Jessica Pavone’s recent work with her string ensemble, Reverse Bloom (Out of Your Head Records) or, deeper in the new-jazz catalogue, Henry Threadgill’s various productions or Roscoe Mitchell’s epochal Sound (Delmark, 1966). Classical new-music adepts could probably come up with more comparisons.

The GEN Ensemble on Altitude 1100 Meters. Satoko Fujii is third from the left (center). Photo: Shigeko Sekiguchi

That kind of stillness is maintained throughout Altitude 1100 Meters, even as different events erupt, some of them rather explosive. The second section, “Morning Sun,” opens with a splash of chromatic piano figures, then a very jazzy pizzicato bass, and a passage of rambunctious free-jazz piano trio (with bass and drums). But passages of solo and group bowed strings — sometimes like a commenting chorus — are never far away, even after a passage of fast-walking swing bass. Perhaps the strings — and those recurring glissandi — are the surrounding air, as they are the enveloping darkness in the Ives piece.

That Fujii can conjure contemplation and stillness (“timeless stillness,” as Ives’s “Central Park in the Dark” has been described) amid rhythmic propulsion and steep dynamic shifts, without falling into stasis or chaos, is one of the enduring pleasures of this album.

If there’s a weakness overall to Altitude 1100 Meters, it’s that there is no singular identifying characteristic to each section. The cumulative gathering of sounds in “Morning Haze” can suggest dawn, but that wouldn’t account for some of its more agitated string passages with throbbing drum mallets. Likewise, Part 4 (“Light Rain”), the longest section, at 19:49, begins with plinky pizzicato string raindrops but explores a variety of musical episodes, including a plaintive violin solo by Yuriko Mukoujima and a jazz bass solo by Hiroshi Yoshino, which transitions into a free-jazz trio when he’s joined by Fujii and drummer Akira Horikoshi, and then a dramatic bowed unison theme by the other strings. Is this all meant to conjure “Light Rain,” or just the feeling of “air” during a light rain?

So, rather than being indicated by a specific form or unified feeling, each section is identifiable for specific episodes. The tonal ambiguity — especially during violinist Mukoujima’s solo in “Light Rain”— sustains just enough anticipatory tension, in a way that a complete fall into atonality would not. And then, at just the right moment, there’s that jazzy solo from bassist Yoshino.

Perhaps the most unified section is Part 3 (“Early Afternoon,” also the shortest, at 7:49). Here the recurring churn of fast bass-drum swing acts as a connective thread for varied string passages — isolated off-kilter metronomic plucks, swarming glissandi — until the final fortissimo drum smash. Such arrangements guarantee that the music is always engaging, from one moment to the next, over the course the album’s entire 58 minutes. Music is one of the ways we experience time — Fujii and GEN make it disappear.

Note: Satoko Fujii plays with her Tokyo Trio (Natto Maki, bass; Oden, drums) March 30, 6-9 p.m., at the Lilypad, Cambridge, Mass., on a double-bill with Spatial Decay; March 31, 7:30 p.m., at the Institute for the Musical Arts, Goshen, Mass.; and April 1, 2 p.m., at New England Conservatory, Eben Jordan Ensemble Room, Boston. The last is part of a free masterclass, open to the public.