Kira Kira - Bright Force (2018)

Satoko Fujii Celebrates Her 60th Birthday by Releasing One New CD Each Month in 2018. this is the fourth one

-------------

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii explains that in Japanese, the name of this collaborative quartet, Kira Kira, means to sparkle or twinkle brilliantly. And that’s just what the music does on the band’s live recording Bright Force (Libra, April 27, 2018). Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Australian keyboardist Alister Spence, and drummer Ittetsu Takemura form an incandescent group whose performance flashes powerfully with brilliant ideas, color, and feeling.

The band is an outgrowth of a long musical relationship between Fujii, Spence, and Tamura. They first met in 2008 when Spence’s trio shared a bill with Fujii’s ma-do quartet in Sydney, Australia. In the ensuing years, Spence and Fujii performed as a duet in Australia and later in Japan on a tour that also included concerts with Fujii’s orchestras in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe. In 2016, Australians Spence and drummer Tony Buck of The Necks joined their Japanese companions to form Kira Kira. The Melbourne Jazz Festival commissioned new compositions from band for their appearance at the festival that year. “We had so much fun that we wanted to play the compositions again in Japan,” Fujii says.

They scheduled a tour of Japan in 2017, but a scheduling conflict prevented Buck from making the trip. Tamura suggested 32-year-old Takemura, whom he knew from working in the Fumio Itabashi band, to replace him. “We were all curious to see how differently the music would turn out with a different drummer,” Fujii says.

Happily, the music turned out so well they decided to release it on CD.

One of the album’s many delights is hearing how distinctive each composer’s contribution is and how the band members bring it to life. Spence’s “Because of the Sun” starts the album with a focused burst of shimmering energy. Fujii, Spence, and Takemura entwine in a roiling skein of sound that forms the basis for a carefully shaped piano solo from Fujii and some high-note pyrotechnics from Tamura.

Tamura’s “Nat 4” is just as explosive as Spence’s piece, but utterly different. Tamura’s written melodies are bold and declamatory and when he solos, his high notes leap into the Louis Armstrong stratosphere. In his solo, Spence proves himself a melodic improviser prone to unpredictable turns of phrase as well as a shaper and constructor of highly detailed electronic sounds. The quartet shapes and reshapes the music, ranging from passages of rapid-fire exchanges of short spikey phrases to avant-rock episodes to slow, spacious, glimmering sections.