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THOMAS FUJIWARA, born in Boston in 1977, started playing drums when he was seven and heard his father’s recording of a Max Roach/Buddy Rich drum contest.
“Nobody else in my family is a musician,” he tells me, “so music was something very personal to me. I had to figure it out as I went along, with the encouragement and support of my parents.
“As a teenager I liked Dr Dre, Mary J Blige and Nas, and at 16 I was already listening very seriously to jazz albums on labels like Blue Note, Impulse! and Prestige.
“I learned so much from my teacher, the great drummer and educator Alan Dawson.
“He’s been at the core of everything I do musically, how I express myself and interact with fellow musicians and listeners.
“His approach to teaching, his concepts and exercises were all about balance, musicality, process, patience and positive contribution to an ensemble.
“With my high school teacher, Robert Ponte Allen, he taught me the jazz repertoire. Then I heard Lee Morgan’s trumpet on the Jazz Messengers album Moanin’. That was a big inspiration, also the sounds of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.”
At 17, Fujiwara moved to New York and lived in Brooklyn. In addition to playing in groups such as the Hook Up Quintet and the Thumbscrew Trio, he became a composer for theater, film and dance and a prominent jazz presence on the New York scene.
His band of musical powerhouses, Triple Double, formed in 2017, features two drummers (Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver); two guitarists (Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook) and two trumpet players (Ralph Alessi with Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet). Their new album is March, featuring compositions by Fujiwara.
I ask him about the dual tools. “The creation of Triple Double had very little to do with the choice of instrumentation, much more to do with the sounds and personalities of the musicians and thinking about how they would interact and blend. Triple Double is definitely about the unique people involved in making the music.
“I like the idea of mirroring the instrumental pairings, but not too literally. We share common instruments that we have played most of our lives and use to express ourselves, but our paths and forms of expression are vastly different, though complementary.
“There is a common language, but different and personal uses of that language to create our own stories, both collectively and independently. We talk through sound and music.”
How about the album title, March? Does he see it as a symbol of the fight for justice during the era of the killing of George Floyd and the resistance against him, and the atrocities of Donald Trump?
“It expresses some of these things and more, and most importantly, I would like each listener to interpret the sounds in their own personal way, hopefully relating to them as individuals in a society/community.”
The spirit of unity in contradiction is central to the album, especially in songs like Docile Fury Ballad, Life Gets Only More or For Alan, Part 2 – a tribute to Dawson, where the musicianship is unbelievably brilliant, with the ever-creative drumming of Fujiwara and Cleaver and Alessi and Ho Bynum stretch the soul and ears with the guitars of Seabrook and Halvorson, raging and soothing with simultaneous artistry.
I ask Fujiwara, is the group coming to the waves soon?
“We love performing and looking for live setups for an engaged audience. We were in Geneva in March and hope to return to Europe soon.”
Don’t miss them when they play here again – some of the best improvisers on both sides of the Atlantic, that’s for sure.
A March from Thomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double is released by Firehouse Records.
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