Some artists are superstitious when it comes to their birthdays. James Joyce for instance scrambled to complete Ulysses for publication on the date of his 40th birthday on 2 February 1922, to that end continuing to send letters and telegrams and even making telephone calls laden with corrections to Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company who had agreed to publish his controversial novel, and Maurice DarantiĆØre, his printer who was based in Dijon, right up until the last moment, resulting in a notoriously error-strewn text.
And by the end of the decade when a mixture of criticism, fatigue and his own failing eyesight forced him to consider abandoning work on his next epic Finnegans Wake, he approached his fellow Irish novelist and Paris dweller James Stephens with the idea of having him cowrite or even complete the text, a ludicrous notion which belied their differences of style and was borne almost entirely out of his (as it turns out false) belief that the two men shared the same birthday.
The twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg on the other hand suffered from triskaidekaphobia and worried that he would die at an age which was a multiple of 13, so fretting over his 65th birthday that the modernist composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar was tasked with reading his horoscope, upon which he generously advised Schoenberg that the year would be trying but was unlikely to prove fatal.
Alas in September of 1950 upon his 76th birthday, his lifelong friend Oskar Adler who also happened to be a composer and esotericist decided to put the fright into Schoenberg by explaining that the numbers 7 and 6 added up to 13. Schoenberg, who had previously concerned himself only with multiplication, would indeed die at the age of 76 the following July, fifteen minutes before midnight on Friday the 13th having spent the preceding days in bed in a depressed and increasingly hopeless stupor.
Satoko Fujii made sure to commemorate her 60th birthday back in 2018, when the acclaimed pianist released a new record for each month of the year from Solo to the duo album Mizu and Triad among other works for trios and quartets, while Ninety-Nine Years and Kikoeru, the latter a heartfelt tribute to her former bandmate the departed tenor saxophonist Masaya Kimura, captured the full breadth and sweep of her Berlin and Tokyo orchestras.
Then in 2022 she put together a dream ensemble in New York City to mark her hundredth album as a leader with Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams featuring Ingrid Laubrock, Sara Schoenbeck, Wadada Leo Smith and Natsuki Tamura who sputtered and shimmered, making for a charmingly expressive horn section while Ikue Mori spun her far-out electronics and Brandon LĆ³pez stunted on bass with Tom Rainey and Chris Corsano doubling up on percussion.
Yet as her 65th birthday approached there were no plans to celebrate or otherwise account for the occasion until Fujii struck upon an idea with just a few months to spare until the big date in the fall of 2023. Escaping the summer heat with her elderly parents, she spent a couple of months in rented accommodation in the highlands of Nagano prefecture, an area of natural beauty which is roundly known for its wintry sports and snowy vistas, its hot springs and lakes as those voluminous mountain ranges string together to help form the Japanese Alps and make the prefecture a veritable breeding ground or haven for resorts, ryokan and onsen.
Already she had in mind the realisation of another enduring vision, with Fujii having long harboured the hope of composing for a string ensemble. In fact she already knew which musicians she was going to invite to form the new ensemble, which she has named GEN which means simply ‘string’ in Japanese. All that was left was to start writing the music, which threw up a practical challenge as her rental unit was furnished only with a small electronic keyboard, at some remove from her usual setup of an acoustic piano with its resonant sequence of keys, hammers and vibrating then amplified strings. Fujii writes that:
When I compose music, I am guided to a great extent by the images that these resonances conjure up for me. So I was curious what sort of music would emerge without that source of inspiration.
Help was close at hand not so much in the view or other divertissements but in the very texture of the air in those summertime highlands, with Fujii adding:
The air’s density, weight and feeling changes from morning to twilight up on the plateau. We live totally immersed in air, but we’re usually completely unaware of it. In that special location, it started talking to me. The five parts of the suite are named for different times of day but 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.
In the end the nearly hour-long suite which makes up Altitude 1100 Meters took less than a month to complete.
The first performance of the suite took place just a few days after her 65th birthday. The following months brought two subsequent performances, with the last in March of 2024 at the Shibuya venue Koen-dori Classics providing the music for Altitude 1100 Meters. For these special dates Fujii on the piano was joined by Yuriko Mukoujima and Ayako Kato on violins, Atsuko Hatano on viola and electronics, Hiroshi Yoshino on bass and Akira Horikoshi on the drums, with the Orchestra Tokyo and former Satoko Fujii ma-do member the only piece of the GEN ensemble to have previously appeared on record with the bandleader.
Altitude 1100 Meters swoops rather than soars through its opening moments, as the low drone of Yoshino’s bass is juxtaposed by the swallow dives or dive bombs of the violins, which take divergent lines as they plunge and sweep through the brisk morning atmosphere. In the distance we can hear the reverberations of Horikoshi’s bass drum, a ripe gong whose clarity of tone emphasises a sense of spaciousness, with every element judiciously chosen or in its right place and a clear separation between the instruments. Amid the elegant strains of the violin, suddenly ‘Morning Haze’ comes alive through the martial cracks of the drum kit which cleave a space for more rustic airs on the strings and conjure a real sense of strife, though with the dignity of bushido or other codified forms of chivalry.
Those martial tones also characterise the second track, as ‘Morning Haze’ gives way to ‘Morning Sun’, whose violin glissandi are accompanied by the tentative play of Fujii’s keys and make room for the deeper bows of the viola. Whether it’s that reddish orb taking its place in the sky or the heaviness of a day which is now past its dawning, ‘Morning Sun’ bears a thicker atmosphere as the strings splinter and some heaving drum rolls cede to a more rangy or gangly section on the bass, a deceptive lull which soon segues into Fujii’s runaway piano clusters. Both denser and more rough and ready than ‘Morning Haze’, the violins pierce the sky or sound like the whistles and vibrations of a kettle coming to a boil as they squeal through their upper registers.
In writing for this new GEN ensemble, Fujii says that she wanted ‘to bring out the unique character of the strings. Strings can easily do some things that other instruments can’t. For example, they can bend notes and play microtones in a way that the piano can’t’. From the portamenti and glissandi of the violins to the mutes and slaps of the double bass and Fujii’s own bounding runs or roiling tone clusters, the five pieces which comprise Altitude 1100 Meters capture the expressive possibilities of such instruments while running the gamut from impressionism to atonality, or from classical graces to the kind of rangy and wide-grooved improvisational jazz which has long been Fujii’s forte.
As we embrace the shifting aerosphere and enter into the headspace of ‘Early Afternoon’, the alarums of the viola and violins are interspersed by a driving rhythm section as the bass and drums play bluesy, hard bop figures in staccato fashion, walloping the senses. Amid some crashing piano keys the bass and cymbals reemerge to steer the composition, now counterposed by a few sparely plucked strings which veer across the channels of the mix, a chaser before the siren alarms return and all of these component parts come together to produce a clangorous din at the climax. Then in a kind of coda to the piece a lone winding string and a bass drone carry us inescapably towards the next chapter.
Prepared piano helps to yield an array of boinging sounds in the opening moments of ‘Light Rain’ as strings are variously plucked and twanged, rubbed and fingered. Somewhat hoarse but still eloquent, a violin steadily materialises and plays a countryfied air then is swallowed up by a squealing mass, as a rumbling low end comprised by some mixture of the bass, viola and electronics begins to conjure a sense of danger. Out of the enveloping murk percussive rattles and scrapes evoke a shower curtain being drawn or a trolley or stretcher hobbling down a hospital corridor, briefly reinforcing the horror movie aesthetic.
Then shortly after the seven-minute mark, between some deep sighs and loose keys a lovelorn string begins to arc and wilt before our very eyes, as Mukoujima commences an expressive violin solo. The tone and context might call to mind Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard viewed through raised hands and a softening lens, as she at once advances in the mode of a come-on and engages in a timeless retreat, before the piece slowly bounds to life again through Yoshino’s patient and rubbery bass rhythms.
Hitherto quite spare, now ‘Light Rain’ starts to sound a bit overcast or submerged as the strings wail and the bass provides a woozy undercurrent. In the right aspect even the play of light rain might seem to lash down on steep hills or concrete, but here thunder threatens towards the close of the piece through some drum rolls and cymbal crashes before Hatano’s viola seems to throw a string around the clouds and wring out the last few drops of lingering moisture.
With a crash and a kick ‘Light Rain’ segues into ‘Twilight’, the closing part of the suite. It’s a theatrical display as the curtain falls on the day and the stars are hoisted up into the developing evening. Straddling his kit with an assortment of kicks and hits, the first minute and a half of ‘Twilight’ entails a drum solo from Horikoshi, until the strings filter in and Mukoujima begins to trace the sky as Kato and Hatano on violin and viola hold up a vast mirror, casting reflections through space whether of ambery orange or blue-violet.
Fujii hammers out a single key on the piano as the composition builds to a crescendo. Gleaming piano clusters, colliding drums and imposing strings give way to a glassy ascent, and suddenly we’re out there in the yonder with only a runaway violin and dolent bass to keep us company. Then a pitch-bent string and a few swallowing piano rolls stir everything back to life as GEN come together like a swarm, with Fujii and her ensemble ending Altitude 1100 Meters on a note of pummelling grandiosity.
