If you consider yourself a fan of John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, and are yearning for a bit of modal jazz with a spiritual bent and a contemporary character, look no further than Fukushima the decidedly non-toxic or radioactive debut full-length by the Sinsuke Fujieda Group, which depending on your perspective offers the added bonus of a winnowing violinist who takes the place of a second horn player.
Headed by the saxophonist Fujieda – who performed with the broken beat, downtempo and club jazz producers Why Sheep?, i-dep and Calm before linking up with the Japanese cumbia collective Mumbia Y Sus Candelosos – the group released a couple of 7-inch records in 2022 and 2024 before embarking on this grander project, which sounds slick and refined and almost effortlessly deep yet still richly detailed and sonorous.
The blend of modal jazz and spiritual airs within a contemporary setting is hardly unique, as aspects of that sound and its practices can be found in the conscientious epics of Kamasi Washington, in the jubilant constructions of Idris Ackamoor though they draw less from Coltrane than from Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, in the Blue Note records of Immanuel Wilkins or in the London scene which is handily represented by Nubya Garcia.
What the Sinsuke Fujieda Group seem to offer is a distillation of the form which clearly evokes some of those early-sixties modal classics while also embracing the various backgrounds of the players, relative newcomers to the scene who have hitherto noodled in jazz-adjacent genres from beat-heavy electronic dance music to more wistful ambiances, rock fusions and local takes on cumbia and reggae. Fukushima certainly seems to have struck a chord, with the record at the time of writing little more than one month after its release already causing a ruckus and selling for steep prices on reseller platforms like Discogs.
Emerging through a tassel of bells, like the animated character Mr Benn who enters a costume shop ready to engage in a world of fantasy, the album opener and title track ‘Fukushima’ begins with a vamp on the piano and Fujieda’s rich and slightly rasping tenor. The pianist Shinichi Tsukamoto plays a brief passage which is soon accompanied by the saxophone and Fumiko Takeshita’s increasingly high-pitched violin, with the three musicians soloing and accompanying broadly in sequence.
The first winding violin solo reaches for the summit and takes a more temperate course, sometimes sounding melodious and sometimes more shrill, also serving to showcase the snap of the rhythm section before Tsukamoto begins playing cascades of keys, scaling peaks and descending in steps until the saxophone and violin again join hands for a moment of thrumming concordance. Conga drums lead us out of the climax and in the closing moments of ‘Fukushima’ the violin and saxophone diverge, as Takeshita plays long lines separating wheat from chaff while the bandleader Fujieda plays his tenor in shorter bursts, with fur around the edges.
For the second piece a clave pattern on the drums is furnished by close harmonies and lustrous melodies on what is described as an oriental composition. Then after three minutes an interlude of electric bass opens out onto a helter-skelter flow of saxophone over the click-clack of percussion and chordal accompaniment from the piano, whose relative sparseness gives it a steep, wafting kind of quality. As the violin winds down ‘Float In Oriental Spring’ briefly drifts in the languorous air, hovering over the swirl of a ride cymbal before the bass splays and the ensemble race again towards a conclusion.
It is the bassist Shigeru Kato, the drummer Kensaku Ohsumi and the percussionist Daisuke Alkhaly who round out the sextet, with Kato’s rubbery bass and an altogether tight rhythm section on ‘Silent Night’ allowing first the tenor saxophone and then the violin to engage in longer drones while the piano plunks away in the background for depth and emphasis. In the final third of the piece, Tsukamoto steps forward with a jaunty melody on the keys, on a track which feels more like an entryway or capper to a night of revelry than a spiritual revery or soothing pastorale which might lull one to sleep.
‘Nobody Knows’ offers a change of pace, more smooth and elegant as Alkhaly plays another clave while the piano and bass work in tandem to provide a sense of uplift. They create the space for sweeping strings and the deft ache of Fujieda’s soprano saxophone, whose winding rainswept patter manages to remain both upbeat and yearning while occasionally calling to mind the bal-musette.
The penultimate song on the album, ‘Nobody Knows’ is an exceedingly fine composition, with the piano in the middle section once again slowing things down and adding a moment of respite before the saxophone returns to the fray, watery and limpid. Then the closer ‘Perspective’ zips along in playful and pulsating fashion, redolent of the swinging sixties even as the lush melodicists and deft beatmakers of the Sinsuke Fujieda Group pull a cherished past into the diffuse present.
