Back in September 2018, Satoko Fujii and Alister Spence put forth an album that featured only the former on piano and the latter on Fender Rhodes and effects. But Intelsat was hardly the only recent collaboration between the Japanese and Australian savants of progressive music. Imagine Meeting You Here (Alister Spence Music) is a one-eighty from that intimate one-on-one encounter of last year; Spence now assumes the role of composer and conductor of a fourteen-piece orchestra headed by Fujii, once again on piano.
“Imagine Meeting You Here” is a five-part suite that Spence intended to be performed by an improvising orchestra, so he turned to his friend Satoko Fujii to undertake the task of bringing this work to life. Fujii premiered “Imagine” with her orchestras across various cities in Japan in 2016, and her Kobe unit revisited the suite again in 2017. That performance, at Kobe’s Big Apple jazz club, was captured for this album.
As a composer and leader on a larger scale, Spence is a kindred spirit of Satoko Fujii, but he makes his own mark. “Imagine Meeting You Here 1 (Imagine)” begins with a quiet march, not really hitting its stride until more than four minutes in. That’s when the full force of the horns is brandished but instead of opening up into an explosive release – as a Fujii composition might be apt to call for — there’s improvising by Natsuki Tamura on trumpet and Eiichiro Arasaki on tenor sax that carries on without the overall thrust of the performance losing the stride.
The gonzo chant backed only by Yoshikazu Isaki on drums delightfully kicks off “Imagine Meeting You Here 2 (Meeting)” and soon, the horns mimic the chant. Spence sets aside a moment in the middle of the song where the musicians go totally free prior to regrouping to state a variation on that chant. Spence’s originality shows up on “Imagine Meeting You Here 3 (You)” in the form of subdividing the big ensemble into four, nimbler independent units that somehow move together in the larger scope of the music, resulting in the right mixture of chaos and control.
“Imagine Meeting You Here 4 (Here)” is presaged by a sprawling, unaccompanied Hiroshi Funato bass solo that gives no hint of the backbeat-driven, adventurous motif that soon follows. If that’s not bold enough, then eleven horns simultaneously improvising might be. The harmonious calmness of the closing “Imagine Meeting You Here 5 (Postscript)” is layered on top by discreet spontaneity that puts edgy accents on the margins.
It turns out that Satoko Fujii’s rules-breaking orchestras can continue with its marvelously misbehaving ways even when someone else is leading it. And in doing so, that ‘someone else,’ Alister Spence, is shown to have the imagination and daring on the level of Fujii herself. Imagine Meeting You Here goes on sale February 19, 2019.
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