The conflux of spiritual jazz with rootsy Americana often takes a minimalist bent, finding a nexus somewhere between the Coltranes and Pharoah Sanders on the one hand and Ry Cooder or Bill Frisell on the other, as though emphasising the liquidity of those sheets of sound while eliding some of their verticality, embracing with a sense of spaciousness and solitude smooth transitions and bluesy slides. The result can sound like a winding tour of sandstone buttes and barren canyons, or a night spent beneath the overhang of spiralling cypresses gazing rapt at a cavalcade of stars.
Fuubutsushi however make this alchemy less strange and less solitary, more lucid and verdant which is a tribute to the sensitivity of the players and their instrumentational mix. Chris Jusell interrupts the aching strains of his violin, which are sometimes folksy and fiddle-like, with mandolin and spurts on the marimba and vibes, while Chaz Prymek wields a wealth of guitars whose spectral shapes sometimes stretch towards breezy Hawaiian melodies, an airing out of regional flora buttressed by field recordings which also takes in the Mountain Prairies and the Midwest.
Matthew Sage’s steady drum patter can slip into cavernous rolls while cymbals ripple and billow strewn with a soft brush, as the multi-instrumentalist also unfolds tender and ruminating, slow-building piano chords and undulating, subtly distorted synthesizer throbs among drones and other airs on the harmonica, accordion and clarinet. Meanwhile the saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi – who has collaborated with everyone from his fellow squallers Camila Nebbia and Marta Tiesenga and the percussionist Tony Lugo to the immigrindcore collective Chepang and the metal-singed noisemakers Agriculture and Samuel Goff – cuts through the ambient Americana plus the upbeat tempo of the drums festooned with bell chimes and other accoutrements, his sometimes winnowing and sometimes fiery or searching reeds adding a full-bodied sonority to Meridians, which foregrounds his cherubic voice. This is still a spiritual take on jazz but more in the vein of cosmic fusion and the ECM catalogue, with some of the smooth crossover appeal of the Gondwana Records cohort, a post-rock approach to timbre and texture and the watchful lyricism of Sage’s recent collaborative album with Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich.
The quartet came together in the depths of the coronavirus pandemic and released four albums, one for each of the seasons, which were collected under the title Shiki (四季) in late 2021. Their new album Meridians was again recorded by distance, and reflects the disparity in time zones, with the four sides of the record given the labels ‘Pacific’, ‘Mountain’, ‘Central’ and Eastern’ which broadly approximate their moods and themes. The close-miked nature of their missives gives Meridians both an intimacy and the sort of separation between instruments which evokes that iconic ECM sound, while their decision to self-produce and publish exclusively via Sage’s own Cached.Media imprint, which pulled itself off Bandcamp around the turn of the year, emphasises both a punkish do-it-yourself ethos and what they characterise as a ‘farm-to-table, grassroots approach’.
Early tracks on Meridians steer between the Sigur Rós matrices of ‘Hamilton’ which highlights Shiroishi’s vocals and the cosmic jazz of ‘Distance Learner’ which at moments might even evoke the funk shimmer of Lonnie Liston Smith or the celestial whirlpools of Goran Kajfeš Tropiques. Opening with the crunch of foliage underfoot and a tremor of sentimental strings, the Star Wars expanded universe-referencing ‘Tenel Ka (First Crush)’ soon stretches out into an elegant 7/4 groove as the saxophonist delivers a generous solo which is picked up by Prymek on the electric guitar.
During the pandemic Matthew Sage became a father, with the poignant and fraying ‘Light in the Annex’ his attempt to capture both the wonders and tensions of parenthood through the creation of his first standard on the piano. As the violin of Chris Jusell takes up the melody, ‘Light in the Annex’ plays like a piece of glacial chamber music until Shiroishi’s saxophone drops in and turns those free-sailing floes into capillary waves, which ripple outwards before his vocals, languid and flowering, offer a return to the Pacific key, like the wind-down after a luau. The track closes through the static of a baby monitor, added as a coda by Chaz Prymek who had surreptitiously recorded Sage shushing his child gently to sleep.
The accordion at the end of ‘Nora Nora’ winds up the track in the manner of the bal-musette, while ‘Pool Tile Blue’ which might signify International Klein Blue or something lighter through its plunging keys and burnished horn really captures those shimmering caustics. ‘Barrel Duet’ is duskier, a tumbleweed Western with a somewhat doleful and attritional violin plus a droning accordion, drags of saxophone, distant rumbles and the susurration of Sage’s chimes and sticks.
‘Wonder Years’ leads with another tender and yearning vocal before the track is saturated by a queasy amalgam of oscillating organ licks. ‘Spent for Light’ at first sounds like the bowing and creaking fade-down of Meridians, but plays with the tempo through a series of distortions and synthetic bleeps, as if stepping one foot inside of a spaceship which finally blasts off as we switch between first-person and widescreen perspectives, scanning the debris left in the rocket’s wake as the craft becomes a mere slither in a vast sky, one mottled and forlorn strand of the dusty interstellar ambiance. The title track then nestles in the bosom of the violin until bass clarinet and smeared stretches of accordion put out the flame, like a brass snuffer grasping at the candle with one last jingle.
