Tonight: Satoko Fujii, Kappa Maki, Alex Cline at Blue Whale

photo: Toru Sasaki

Since her 1996 duo set with Paul Bley on Something About Water (Libra), pianist Satoko Fujii has led numerous groups in widely varied formats ranging from free jazz to avant-rock to new-music chamber works. The possessor of a most formidable set of playing chops, she is an intellectually engaged and refreshingly progressive-minded musician whose idiosyncratically shaped and harmonized compositions were given their most far-reaching and most beautiful settings in her long-running avant chamber-jazz quartet ma-do. This spring tour celebrates the 20th anniversary of the crucial Libra Records, the free-jazz label set up by Fujii and partner trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. Tamura, who also goes by the name Kappa Maki, is a beautifully unclichˇd tone-warper with an equally brazen disregard for the hollow holys of his instrument. In a match made in future-jazz heaven, Fujii and Maki will be joined tonight by the visionary drummer/composer Alex Cline.
ŠŠ John Payne