Tomas Fujiwara - Dream Up (Out of Your Head Records 2025) *****

By Gary Chapin

I went through a phase, decades ago, when I had a deep fascination with like-instrument groupings. The World Sax Quartet, the Clarinet Summit, Rasputina, the League of Crafty Guitarists, ROVA, et many cetera. Among these was Max Roach’s M’boom , a septet that set expectations for jazz percussion ensembles. They included trap sets AND every other thing you can imagine that makes a pleasing sound when you hit it. Part of M’boom’s charm was its outre quality, but part was its connections to traditions from the Caribbean and other places. (The Balafon Marimba Ensemble was a rabbit hole that I well and truly went down.)

All to say there is solid ground in my mind for Thomas Fujiwara’s Percussion Quartet to build from and excel upon—not to mention his own long experiences and collaborations, such as the brilliant Pith (reviewed here). Let’s thank whatever stars (or granting organizations) had to align for Roulette to commission this work.

I’m tempted to just say “there are a lot of drums!” But quantity, in this case, has a quality all its own. Fujiwara does “drums and compositions;” while Tim Keiper comes with “donso ngoni, kamale ngoni, calabash, temple blocks, timbale, djembe, castanets, balafon, found objects, and other percussion.” Kaoru Watanabe wields “o-jimedaiko, uchiwadaiko, shimedaiko, and shinobue.” Patricia Brennan brings her sublime vibes to the mix.

You can hear Brennan shimmer in the opening piece, a haunting reflective number that leans into the disquieting, intentional imperfection of the vibe’s timbre. From this beginning we are reminded that the usual rules don’t apply, that slow-slow and fast-fast can play in the same space together, and that the absence of melodic information from many of these instruments (though there are also many pitched percussion) leaves an opening for other types of information.

One of those types of info would be the ritualistic, spiritual, and uncanny. “Mobilize,” for example, brings to mind New Orleans parade beats, but also the Dr. John voodoo vibe of Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya(“dance ka-lin-da-ba-doom!”), and “Blue Pickup” comes at us with a martial urgency. Prayer, war, and mating are the most ritualized activities of the human creature, and all have historically required the services of the drummer in order to achieve transcendence—for good or ill.

As the record progresses, Fujiwara uses the drums and their possibilities, stacking up little instruments and large—and again, Brennan’s vibes—in ways that feel impossibly complex but also inevitable. It’s the sort of paradox one expects of a great composer—it’s kinda their job—and the inclusion of rock solid improvisers adds generative chaos to the mix. Dream Up is an extraordinary act of emergence. It’s like water. Neither oxygen nor hydrogen are wet, but bring them together and they sustain all life on the planet. Dream Up’s quality of sustaining—life? soul? spirit? joy?--is equally a function of the quality that arises between the individual percussionists. Five stars.