I have to be in the right mood for free form jazz and much as I admire Circum-Disk, the artist-run record label based in Lille, some of its offerings can be a little difficult.
Kaze is a cooperative quartet featuring Japanese composer-pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura along with French trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins, and this is their first completely improvised album.
And this one is different from other free form jazz issues – different as in, you can listen to it without the thought of finger nails and blackboards. I think this is because however experimental it gets – one section sounds like mice scuttling (playing inside the piano, I think), another sounds like someone rolling round on bubble wrap – they keep in mind a composition we can’t hear, so it always seems to have a flow and a beat; a logic.
Admittedly you need a sense of adventure to listen to it, but in some places the otherwise inaudible composition bubbles to the surface and you get what sounds like music. The more experimental moments have their own fascination too, either because they are fundamentally interesting or because you wonder what instrument is making the sound. The most fascinating is a trumpet conversation at the end of track one that sounds like two people talking; people made of ballons, maybe, but a genuine conversation.
“Our compositions for Kaze have always been pretexts for the improvisation,” said Orins.
”Having played a mix of written music and free improvisation for so many years gives us a strong consciousness of structure, and in the end I think it’s hard to tell that what we play on ‘Unwritten’ is only improvised.”
Amazingly it was recorded live on a European tour in May 2023, at a concert in Lille, the hometown of Pruvost and Orins.
“We just played without any discussion,” Fujii said.
Orins added: “We never really talk about music, except if it’s written, but even then not very much. We prefer to talk about food.”
Opener “Thirteen Years” is 37 minutes long and goes from scratchy nothingness to a flowing ensemble piece. “We Waited” (17m 26s long) opens conventionally with some gentle piano before some odd vocalisations that give the piece a weird intensity, a lovely tune on piano underlain by first vocals then some strange trumpet sounds, and percussion like tinned beans falling slowly off a shelf. Closing piece “Evolving” is a mere eight-and-a-half minutes long with a lot of drumming (and possibly some iron castanets).
See circum-disc.bandcamp.com/album/unwritten.
JMC
