Dato/tid
29.03.2017
20:00 – 23:00

Sted
KoncertKirken

Fujii/Tamura/Anker – Henrik Pultz Melbye – Kaja Draksler

Satoko Fujii, piano
Natsuki Tamura, trumpet
Lotte Anker, sax
 
Henrik Pultz Melbye – solo sax
 
Kaja Draksler – solo piano
 
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Tickets: 100 dkk / stud 50 dkk
 
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SATOKO FUJII
Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer SATOKO FUJII as one of the most original voices in jazz today. She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a band-leader who gets the best collaborators to deliver,” says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on approximately 80 albums as a leader or co-leader, the Japanese native (now based in Berlin) synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone.
Since she burst onto the scene in 1996 after earning her graduate diploma from New England Conservatory, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music. In 2013, she debuted a new ensemble, the Satoko Fujii New Trio featuring bassist Todd Nicholson and drummer Takashi Itani, the first piano trio she has led since her trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black last played together in 2008. With addition of her husband trumpeter Natsuki Tamura in 2014 the core trio expanded into a new quartet called Tobira. The all-acoustic Satoko Fujii ma-do quartet, together from 2007 to 2012, showcased the latest developments in her composition for small ensembles in an intimate acoustic setting. Another acoustic quartet, the Min-Yoh Ensemble with trumpeter Tamura, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, and accordionist Andrea Parkins is dedicated to developing written and improvised music in the collective spirit of Japanese folkloric music. Fujii also led an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins from 2001 to 2007.
Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles. Since 1996, she has released a steady stream of acclaimed releases for jazz orchestras and in 2006 she simultaneously released four big band albums: one from her New York ensemble, and one each by three different Japanese bands. In 2013 she debuted the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Chicago at the Chicago Jazz Festival. In 2015, she released a CD by her new Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin and worked with orchestras in the Oakland, Calif., and Beilefeld, Germany.
In addition to playing accordion in Tamura’s Gato Libre quartet, she also performs in a duo with Tamura, as an unaccompanied soloist, with the international quartet Kaze, and in ad hoc groupings with musicians working in different genres. Her special projects have included collaborations with ROVA saxophone quartet, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, pianist Myra Melford, bassist Joe Fonda, and Junk Box, a collaborative trio with Tamura and percussionist John Hollenbeck. She is also a member of a collaborative quartet, Dos Dos, which features flamenco-trained percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn, and percussionist Faín S. Dueñas, a founder and former member of the Grammy-nominated band Radio Tarifa. She has also toured and recorded with saxophonist Larry Ochs’ Sax and Drum Core, and appeared on albums by drummer Jimmy Weinstein, saxophonist Raymond McDonald, and Japanese free jazz legend, trumpeter Itaru Oki.
With 2016 marking her 20th year in creative music, Fujii has special events planned for around the world in Europe, North America, and Japan.
“Whether performing with her orchestra, combo, or playing solo piano, Satoko Fujii points the listener towards the future of music itself rather than simply providing entertainment,” writes Junichi Konuma in Asahi Graph. She tours regularly appearing at festivals and clubs in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Europe. Her ultimate goal: “I would love to make music that no one has heard before.”
 
NATSUKI TAMURA
Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late ’60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie,” according to Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com. Tamura’s seemingly limitless creativity led François Couture in All Music Guide to declare that “… we can officially say there are two Natsuki Tamuras: The one playing angular jazz-rock or ferocious free improv… and the one writing simple melodies of stunning beauty… How the two of them live in the same body and breathe through the same trumpet might remain a mystery…”
Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. He has led First Meeting, a quartet featuring pianist Satoko Fujii, drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, and electric guitarist Kelly Churko, whose first CD, Cut the Rope was described as “a noisy, free, impatient album, and ranks among Fujii and Tamura’s most accomplished,” — Steve Greenlee, Boston Globe.
Since 2005, Tamura has focused on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre, a quartet that featured Fujii on accordion, Kazuhiko Tsumura on guitar, and Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass. The quartet’s poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their “surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty that at times borders on flat-out impressionism,” by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. Dan McClenaghan in All About Jazz described their fourth CD, Shiro, as “intimate, something true to the simple beauty of the folk tradition…Tamura’s career has largely been about dissolving musical boundaries. With Gato Libre and Shiro, the trumpeter extends his reach even deeper into the prettiest, most accessible of his endeavors.” After the unexpected passing of Norikatsu in 2012, Tamura added trombonist Yasuko Kaneko to the group. The new configuration released its first CD, Du Du, in 2014.
Earlier bands led by the constantly exploring trumpeter have been very different in character. Peter Marsh of the BBC had this to say of the 2003 Natsuki Tamura Quartet release Hada Hada: “Imagine Don Cherry woke up one morning, found he’d joined an avant goth-rock band and was booked to score an Italian horror movie. It might be an unlikely scenario, but it goes some way to describing this magnificent sprawl of a record.” The collaborative trio Junk Box, which Tamura co-founded in 2006 along with pianist Fujii and drummer John Hollenbeck, plays Fujii’s “composed improvisations,” graphic scores that take “ensemble dynamics to great creative heights,” says Kevin Le Gendre in Jazzwise. Their music “is full of bluster and agitation that nonetheless retains moments of great melodic beauty, usually by way of concise, pertly pretty motifs that trumpeter Tamura plays in between bursts of withering roars that often dissolve into austere overtones.”
Since 1997, Tamura has recorded five CDs with his ongoing duo with pianist (and wife) Satoko Fujii and won accolades from critics and audiences alike. “The wife-husband team from Japan was simply brilliant,” says Steve Feeney of the Portland Press Herald. “Though their work has a fair amount of compositional structure, it consistently reveals a wide-open and unpredictable nature that makes its performance a thrilling ride for the listener.” In addition to their intimate duo performances, Tamura collaborates on many of Fujii’s own projects, including her Min Yoh and ma-do quartets, and big bands in New York, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and elsewhere.
Born on July 26, 1951 in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, Tamura was a regular member of saxophonist-composer Larry Ochs’ Sax and Drumming Core. As an unaccompanied soloist, he’s released two CDs, including Dragon Nat (2014). He and Fujii are also members of Kaze, a collaborative quartet with French musicians trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins.
“As unconventional as he may be,” notes Marc Chenard in Coda magazine, “Natsuki Tamura is unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.”
 
LOTTE ANKER
is a Copenhagen-based saxophone player and composer working in the field between experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music.
Her music includes both melodic (often twisted or fragmented) elements and more abstract textural material and covers a wide territory from minimal, transparency to dense and dark expressionism.
Lotte Anker has been initiator and bandleader of a number of highly acclaimed collaborations and groups such as Anker,
Taborn, Cleaver (w/ Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver), Trio with Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori, to name a few.
Other recent projects are the 8-piece group What River Ensemble, duo with Fred Frith and a quartet with Johannes Bauer, Clayton Thomas and Paul Lovens.
Lotte has performed at major festivals and concert spaces in most of Europe, USA, Canada, Asia, Africa and the Middle East and has also played and toured with Marilyn Crispell, Herb Robertson, Tim Berne, Okkyung Lee, Paal Nilssen-Love, Joelle Leandre, Raymond Strid, Sten Sandell, Andrew Cyrille, Phil Minton, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Peter Friis-Nielsen and many others.
Compositional work includes music for both small group and large ensemble and for both contemporary new music and modern/experimental jazz ensembles
 
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Henrik Pultz Melbye
har de sidste par år gjort sig bemærket i avantgarderock bandet SVIN, som har turneret Europa tyndt, udgivet 4 plader og i år spiller på Roskilde Festival.
Derudover har han været særdeles aktiv på den Københavnske scene for improviseret og eksperimenterende musik med diverse ensembler som impro kvartetten The Hum som udgav hjemmesiden www.thehumthesong.net og baryton saxofon duoen Barry, samt diverse ad hoc ensembler med bl.a. Jacob Anderskov, Kresten Osgood, Adam Rudolph.
I 2016 udgav han sin debut plade med Henrik Pultz Melbye Trio som udover at få yderst gode anmeldelser i bl.a. Berlingske Tidende, Jazzspecial og All About Jazz også blev nomineret til en Danish Music Awards Jazz 2016.
I Februar 2017 udgiver han kassette båndet “Frogs // Toads” på Insula. Musikken, som også udkommer digitalt, består af 10 små improvisationer for solo saxofon som viser et udtryksom udforsker det statiske og repetitive og udfordrer saxofonens idiomatiske lyd
ideal.
htt:.//www.henrikpultzmelbye.com
 
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Kaja Draksler
is a Slovenian pianist and composer. After her studies in the Netherlands (BA in jazz piano and MA in classical composition), she decided to stay in Amsterdam, where she is an active member of the improvisors scene, performing extensively all over the Europe. Besides her frequent solo concerts, she has been working regularly with Čudars-Draksler Duo, Feecho, Draksler/Lillinger/ Eldh, and Draksler-Santos Silva duo. She is also one of the founding members of the interdisciplinary group I/O. She recently formed her Octet.
As a composer she has been commissioned by various international groups, ranging from vocal and chamber ensembles to big bands and orchestras.
Kaja is interested in finding ways to merge the composition and (free) improvisation by working with different structures and musical logics. She is drawn to the idea of erasing the stylistic and historical musical borders, and discovering personal expression and language through composition and improvisation.
Releasing her solo record on Clean Feed (2013) brought Draksler a lot of public attention, and allowed her to perform at major festival stages and concert halls. Downbeat wrote about her album The Lives of Many Others: “The young Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler shows off a wealth of sturdy ideas and nonchalant technique on this stunning solo recording.”