They bang, scrape, and push sounds some pianists wouldn’t go near — and then a single note lands, or a high note finds the top of a chord, and you know things have clicked into place.
RogueArt
Myra Melford, Satoko Fujii – piano
Katarahi is a Japanese word for an intimate chat between dear friends, and Satoko Fujii chose it for exactly that reason. Recorded live at the 2024 Jazz Festival Leibnitz, this is only their second album as a duo — seventeen years separate it from their first — and whatever time does to friendship, it has only sharpened what these two hear in each other. Fujii was studying with Paul Bley at New England Conservatory when he introduced her to Melford in 1994 — he knew what he was doing.
They swap pianos during the performance and asked that the record not say who sits where, wanting the music to speak as a single voice. Anyone familiar with either pianist will try to sort them out anyway — the two instruments have subtly different timbres, and both players have strong enough personalities that you keep listening for the seams. But the music keeps pulling you back to the whole. “Interlude” draws you in with single notes trading back and forth, then one piano drops into something like a bass and drum role while the other spirals overhead, muscling in, not to dominate but to push, the way old friends argue. “Signpost” could almost be one player — jagged, clipped lines tumbling over each other at both ends of the keyboard, flurries chasing flurries, until both step back and the room gets quiet again.
There are storms here too. “Pairs” starts with almost nothing — a single note, a chord barely touched, an electronic hum hovering at the edge — before the lower register begins to darken and gather. When it builds it builds from both ends at once, one voice climbing, one descending, crossing paths, neither waiting for the other, until the whole thing crashes into noisy flurries and then, just as suddenly, pulls back to something quieter. “Kaiwa” — the word means conversation — roars out of the gate like two people doing rapid-fire Morse code until the signals tangle, then breathes, and finds something almost songlike underneath. At its peak it doesn’t suggest anger but what Melford has called “compassion and an overabundance of life.”
“Chalk’s” pretty lines weave in and out, delicate notes sounding like early morning rain the way they splatter against one another. Those lines get louder, one piano insistent on holding a melody, while the other lays down rhythms. “IV” is something else entirely: two low notes repeated, higher notes answering, speeding up before a sudden pause, and then a single low note held until it fills the room. What follows is relentless — the same note hammered over and over, before the low register swallows everything in a long dark rumble.
What Fujii and Melford have built here is music that sometimes sounds like two people lost in the same storm. They bang, scrape, and push sounds some pianists wouldn’t go near — and then a single note lands, or a high note finds the top of a chord, and you know things have clicked into place.
