feature photo: Nicki Chavoya
Tomas Fujiwara received a lot of positive feedback for his 2022 Triple Double offering March, primarily for the creative ways Fujiwara utilized all that talent at his disposal. His compositions and arrangements got the most out of his two guitarists (Mary Halvorson, Brandon Seabrook), trumpeters (Ralph Alessi, cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum) and drummers (Gerald Cleaver alongside Fujiwara).
Some improvisations left over from the March sessions didn’t quite fit with the mission of the record, but are still too good to leave on the shelf. “While my colleagues and I are understandably associated with improvised music, I actually play in very few contexts that are just open improv,” asserts Tomas Fujiwara. “All six members of Triple Double use serious composition as a major part of their creative identity.”
The March On EP collects the occasions when Fujiwara’s band weren’t following a chart and just inventing on the spot, with the bulk of it coming from a single performance. The title track is essentially the reason for the EP (the three other tracks are brief duo improvs extracted from March alternative takes). It’s a half-hour long group improvisation that was recorded at the end of the March sessions, after the sextet spent a couple of days sorting through and mastering Fujiwara’s complex pieces.
It must have seemed like a big release for them, and it sounds that way. Fujiwara continues, “I’ve found so much of the improvisation that the band has played within the context of the tunes to be really inspiring and different, so I wanted to try something completely free during the session.”
Coiling up in the opening minutes, the supergroup gradually unwinds, expanding its footprint before the individual soloing begins, often all at once. Meanwhile, Fujiwara and Cleaver keeps a fire lit underneath and when they begin to subside, so does everyone else. Here it becomes clear that these cats are handling the quiet as well as the furious.
Out of the hushed mist emerges Halvorson’s spectral notes, a gentle strain sprung from nowhere. Seabrook follows and opts for nervous skitterings, eliciting puckish responses from others, snowballing until the whole band has fully returned. The chaos that ensues is still controlled, however: Fujiwara and Cleaver regulate the tempo and the tonal players generally stay away from dissonance, striving for melodic development. In fact, for much of the last ten minutes, the band is content to ride the discreetly-mutating groove with carefully chosen spots for individual expressions and right at the end, everyone recedes but for the drums.
Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double is his star-studded vehicle to carrying out his ambitious compositions but musicians capable of anything deserve the chance to play in a setting where anything goes. Thankfully, Fujiwara is allowing us to hear what that’s like.
March On is a digital-only release poised to drop on March 3, 2023. Get it from Bandcamp.
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