Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double: March

Doubling up on instruments in a modern music ensemble has been done by Ornette Coleman in 1960 on Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation and later with his Prime Time bands, by minimalist composer Steve Reich with his Double Sextet in 2007, and by Henry Threadgill in his Double Up band. The architecture of Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double Sextet is seemingly straightforward—two drummer/percussionists (Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver), two guitarists (Brandon Seabrook and the ubiquitous Mary Halvorson), and two brass players (Ralph Alessi, trumpet, and Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet). But the musical permutations are as myriad as you might get from sets of Legos or Lincoln Logs, not only because the players mix and match in pleasantly perplexing patterns and alignments, but also because their tones and technical approaches to the same or similar instruments could hardly be more different, creating kaleidoscopic soundscapes and fractals. Fujiwara wrote six pieces from which he and his colleagues build sonic realms of jazz-rock, grunge, metal, elegant harmony, and spacious, slowly revolving, mobile-like abstraction. The seventh, the closer, is a riveting, improvised 17½-minute drums/percussion duet dedicated to Fujiwara’s childhood mentor Alan Dawson.

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