Harking back to her studies at The New School in the mid-nineties, the Osaka-born pianist Eri Yamamoto recalls the legendary bassist Reggie Workman giving her a piece of advice. ‘You know Eri, for your style playing in a trio will be best. Just stop practising now and go out, walk around the school and find a bassist and drummer’ she remembers him chiding, and after circling the halls she stumbled upon the deft brush and stick work of Ikuo Takeuchi, who happened to hail from Kobe, with the pair meshing so well that they have been playing together ever since.
The trio has been the template for Yamamoto’s work from her debut album Up & Coming in 2001 to A Woman with a Purple Wig, a pandemic-era solace which dropped in the fall of 2022 featuring her longstanding musical partners David Ambrosio on bass and Takeuchi behind the drum kit. The live recording Colors of the Night followed with another frequent collaborator in William Parker stepping in on the bass, but it was their efforts as part of a quartet for Mahakala Music which sparked a new direction for Yamamoto’s ever supple group (the trio’s 2019 album Goshu Ondo Suite, based on a traditional circle dance from Shigu Prefecture, saw Yamamoto, Ambrosio and Takeuchi improvising around a fifty-strong choir).
Freely improvised with a campfire crackle that led the record to be described as a piece of ‘spontaneous folk music’, the album Sparks which was released in the spring of 2022 featured Yamamoto on keys and Parker on bass alongside Steve Hirsh on drums and Chad Fowler on stritch and saxello. That stritch, a straight Buescher alto saxophone closely associated with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, is in Fowler’s hands a diverse instrument whether figuring birdsong and the effects of anthropogenic ambient noise alongside the likes of Shanyse Strickland and Sana Nagano, summoning the Tenebrae and strepitus of the Latin Church with George Cartwright, Kelley Hurt, Christopher Parker, Luke Stewart, Zoh Amba and Hirsh on the quixotic and perfumed Miserere, regaling Old Stories with the indomitable Matthew Shipp or eliding the labours of the day and tentatively Embracing the UnknownĀ astride the great rhythm section of Workman and Andrew Cyrille topped by Ivo Perelman’s fine-fettled tenor.
Yet as she both played and bore witness to Sparks, the bandleader in Yamamoto heard something in Fowler’s tone and immediately envisioned a rhythm and blues record, picturing Fowler’s horn and the earthy bass of Kevin Thomas as a liberating force on her piano and Takeuchi’s percussion. This new quartet, styled here as Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic, settles into some deep grooves on Fly with the Wings while also embracing more tender and bucolic moments.
Yamamoto can easily slip into more straight-ahead jazz, inhabiting a spry though not entirely carefree swing especially on some of her vocal pieces. Her words have a plainspoken quality which is rarely elliptical but sounds like meaning reduced to its essential components, or signposts as on the opening track ‘What Do They Mean’ which ponders ‘Up or down, down or up, right or left, left or right, north or south, south or north, east or west, west or east, what do they mean to me?’ over a classic blues waltz, with stretched out syllables, plosive filled-in scats and the squalling of Fowler’s saxophone as the quartet already proves both expansive and resilient.
The album notes draw a comparison with Mose Allison for his idiosyncratic blend of blues and jazz. On the title piece Fowler’s flute imitates both the patter of birdsong and the lofty patterns of birds in flight, with Yamamoto playing spritely and sparkling runs or dramatic chord clusters. ‘Peach’ is a fleshy ballad with fine brush work, a pronounced bass and a horn which in the first few moments of the track seems to stir itself out of a brooding dolefulness, while ‘Cheer Me Up’ is a bar room jive with a rambunctious breakdown as the percussion sprawls and careens to provide a safety net for the rest of the cast or else to add moments of crashing emphasis.
A wailing saxophone accompanies the tearful exposition of ‘Where To Go’, which is then characterised by plangent piano runs and percussion which seems to tumble down so many flights of stairs, whether headlong or through a staggered, serial kerplunkling. Then Fly with the Wings swoops to a close through the blowy sounds of Yamamoto’s melodica, whose joyous strains blend the ambiance of a street carnival and a bustling port, cutting between the swinging sixties on Carnaby Street, psychedelic funk as an extension of bebop in the vein of Parliament-Funkadelic and On the Corner, plus quintessentially Parisian bal-musette as ‘Let’s Do It’ stomps and skronks to a climax.
A Woman with a Purple Wig struck a note of defiance, embracing the vibrancy of colour and the possibility of fresh starts even through the evasion of a disguise as Yamamoto donned purple locks and shades, describing some of the fear which accompanied her life as an Asian woman in New York City during the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Times change and perseverance has a habit of paying out, with the artist saying of her new album:
If you look at the front cover of Fly with the Wings, I’m wearing a purple wig, right? That is linked to my previous trio album, A Woman with a Purple Wig. That purple wig was for hiding my ethnic identity from the violence during the pandemic and after. So on this new album, I’m still wearing purple wig, but now it’s not hiding my identity. I’m wearing it for fun.
