Satoko Fujii, Ramon Lopez – Confluence (2019, Japan/Spain)
Welcome back, friends, hope you had a chance to listen to some excellent music while I took a bit of a break. To ease us back into our journey through the epic Fedi-sourced catalogue of must-hear albums, our next spotlight is on number 233 on The List, submitted by platenworm.
And, to try something a bit different in terms of the format of these spotlight posts, this Fall season I’m going to try a thing I’m tentatively calling (but will spare y’all by keeping it out of the blog post titles) ‘Four Facts Fall’, where I’ll attempt to keep the spotlight down to – you guessed it – four facts, one of which may or may not be directly about the album being spotlit.[1] Of course, knowing me, I’ll likely get all pumped up about an album/artist and want to include way more than four facts, so the spotlights will likely be more like four sentences that may or may not be way too long. (Perhaps it should be ‘Fourteen Facts…’? Or ‘Forty Facts…’? …’Four Hundred Facts’?!!) But I like facts, you like facts, more facts are good. Also, time doesn’t exist so this format likely will go beyond Winter Solstice. But I digress.
This album features the duo of the wildly prolific virtuoso piano improviser and composer Satoko Fujii and renowned jazz drummer and artist Ramon Lopez. The brilliant, peaceful, contemplative music they coax out of their instruments together sounds like they’ve played together for ages, and yet they had only played together once before recording this. Nearly the entire album was improvised, making its title absolutely apt – “confluence” comes from the late Latin confluentia, itself from the classical Latin verb confluere, where the prefix con– means “together” and fluere “to flow”. The word is typically used when describing where two rivers meet, which is a very lovely metaphor for this collaboration between Fujii and Lopez.
For those of you who had seen the toot, I originally wanted these set up like an Airplane Facts With Max sort of thing where I’d nonsensically but seamlessly jump from facts about the album being spotlit to an incredibly unrelated random fact about music sourced from Fedizens or elsewhere. But, having now written and prescheduled a few of these spotlights, I haven’t even come close to pulling such a thing off, and have edited such attempts out. Also, that toot didn’t get any bites from people wanting to share their infodumping skills, so I deleted the toot (what toot?) and I’ll just see what happens. ↩︎#contemporaryClassical #experimental #freeJazz #improvisation #Japan #jazz #ListenToThis #music #musicDiscovery #piano #RamonLopez #SatokoFujii #spain
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