Culture
Satoko Fujii reflects on the nature of jazz and ‘Dog Days of Summer’
By: Rosie Wong
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – If you’re looking for any hook or simple melody that you usually find in pop music, you’re not going to find it on the Satoko Fujii Quartet’s Dog Days of Summer.
It’s an instrumental album by pianist and composer Satoko Fujii and her bandmates. Featuring Fujii with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, bassist Takeharu Hayakawa, and drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, this album is a work of friendship after an 18-year halt.
If you can imagine two threads that connect the seven pieces in this album, one would be called “directness” and the other “high energy.” Fujii says she prioritizes every band member’s energy in performing and recording their pieces.
“We don’t need to play beautiful; we just show our energy,” she says. “So this is kind of very typical way of our music that we don’t play together, but somehow we are together.”
Not bound by anything rigid, she wants her music alive. That means a piece can be performed one way during a performance and recorded in a slightly different way during a recording. To her, a change in a piece’s arrangement can happen four or five days before the recording, and a key drive for this decision is to ensure the band is projecting its high energy into their work.
To her, music is boundless and open for interpretation.
“Because I’m a person who makes music, I don’t decide my music is jazz or not,” she says. “I think listener would tell this is not jazz or this is jazz or whatever, but I don’t care. I just play my music.”
WOUB’s Rosie Wong interviewed Satoko Fujii about Dog Days of Summer. Find a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Rosie Wong:
What took you and your band 18 years apart to reunite and make music?
Satoko Fujii:
When I stopped playing with this band, I was kind of tired, because this band is pretty much like a rock band. Not just musically, I mean the volume. We play so loud, so I got so tired with big sound. So I actually decided not to play together 18 years ago. And well, basically I’m more like a jazz musician. Jazz, or contemporary music, which doesn’t play so loudly. But anyway, I listened to my old recordings and I found out this rock band, but it sounded so great. So I decided to play again, and I tried playing again. And I found out it’s so exciting. And also 18 years ago, we were all not that young. When we had been playing, we were not so young. But still, we are young, 18 years younger than now. So I mean, as friends, this is big fun playing together again after 18 years.
And so now your new album Dog Days of Summer, what’s the theme of it? How do you describe what’s the overall feeling that you’re trying to go for in this album?
Fujii:
I was so excited to play with them again, but at the same time I knew that I couldn’t play same thing again, because we were different from them back then. We all have different experience. And so I wanted to play something different. So I composed new pieces for this recording and I tried to do some arrangement for the pieces and I tried some different things. But anyway, I found out it with this band, I just need something very direct, something very, I mean, not sophisticated, more very naked feeling. So this is, I think all about that kind of stuff. I mean, not sophisticated, but this is more in a very, very much naked feeling and very, very high energy. So this is all about that.
I read that you’re a pianist composer. For this album, did you also compose the parts for other instruments or just the piano?
Fujii:
Especially with this band, I make melody, harmony, some rhythm stuff, and some structure. How we play the song. we play introduction or we just go to very beginning. I would like to have bass solo or something like that. But I don’t write details, because I know my bandmates are great musicians and they are great composers as well, and they know how to make music more interesting. And the reason I play with them is I wanted to have their feeling, so I don’t write exactly what I want. I mean, I let them do something else. So I write very basic thing with a lot of improvisation part for them and some structure. That’s all I do.
Thank you very much for sharing that. And again, this is a jazz centered album. It’s interesting to see how American jazz and Japanese jazz just feel different, although personally I cannot pinpoint that difference. So how do you interpret jazz and translate that in your music?
Fujii:
Jazz, I think, of course, was born in America, but jazz is international music. I mean just it’s so exciting and alive. And this means I believe anyone can play jazz. I believe, not just America. And we always put something else, and I mean jazz allows us to do that.
Thank you. How would you describe your way of adapting that jazz to make it unique for yourself and your band?
Fujii:
I don’t know, because I don’t think like that. I just play music and I even don’t feel like I’m playing jazz or I’m just playing my music. My background, pretty much a lot of time I spent with learning jazz. So of course I know that my music has a very much jazz sound. But I don’t know, I mean, because very, very jazz has many ways to describe. I mean, some people think jazz is very much style, which has certain reason and certain form or even harmony or whatever. So they think my music probably is not jazz. So that part, I think because I’m a person who makes music, I don’t decide my music is jazz or not. I think listener would tell this is not jazz or this is jazz or whatever, but I don’t care. I just play my music.
That is really, really insightful. It sounds like you are just expressing yourself and your ideas and putting it into sound and you don’t attempt to put it in a box.
Fujii:
No, I don’t want to put everything in some style.