Jazz
OA2 Records · 16 October 2026
The record closes with “Hyakki Yagyo (Night Parade of 100 Demons)”, where Carl Clements picks up the soprano and spirals over a 7/4 groove, and the track before it is named for Okiku, one of Japan’s best-known ghosts. In between sit nine pieces Fumi Tomita wrote out of a book of Japanese woodblock prints his wife gave him, recorded with his quartet on 15 and 16 August 2025 at Northfire Studios in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Tomita is a bassist, composer and professor in the jazz programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, born in New York to a Japanese father and a Chinese-American mother. He got here through rock, and specifically through the progressive rock of the late seventies and early eighties: from there to fusion, and from fusion to piano, then guitar, then finally bass, the instrument he took into the jazz programme at McGill in Montreal. Yokai is the companion piece to The Elephant Vanishes (2019), where he read Haruki Murakami, and it comes out of his father’s death in 2023: he was after spiritual music “in a way that suited the way I play”, he says, and found it in the demons and monsters he’d seen on masks and logos in Japan.
The idea shows up above all in how the quartet is parcelled out. Clements never uses the same horn twice for the same creature: he plays tenor on three tracks, flute on two, alto on “Kiyomori” and soprano at the close, and sits out “Daija” and “Okiku” altogether. That shift of timbre is the album’s main device and it’s what ends up giving each beast a face. On “Amabiko (Sea Lad)” the flute works as a seductive call against Jason Ennis’s pastoral guitar; on “Kitsune (The Fox)” it’s Tomita’s bass that is left alone, with a long, low solo; “Betobeto san” starts out at a deliberate crawl and ends up unhinged, and “Daija (Monster Snake)” wanders the way its title suggests, trying on a melodic idea and shrugging it off for another. On “Okiku”, with Clements absent, the track is left to Gary Fieldman’s brushwork.
What doesn’t travel with the record is precisely what generated it. The music comes out of nineteenth-century prints, and the release offers nothing beyond the titles in rōmaji with a parenthetical gloss; Tomita has booked a run of dates where the pieces are seen and heard at once (Hartford, Brooklyn, Amherst, Springfield, Rochester, plus a lecture at Stanford in February 2027), which means the complete version of the work exists and isn’t the one on sale. On top of that, the label’s own press release describes a track that isn’t here: “Raiju (Thunder Beast)”, with its lightning-ball rhythmic trajectory, appears neither in the OA2 catalogue (OA2 22259) nor in the stores nor in the review. The showiest creature in the album’s pitch is the one you can’t hear on it. The quartet, on the other hand, never slips: Mark Alan Miller recorded it and Warren Amerman mixed and mastered it at Rotary Records in West Springfield, and the result is a bestiary that holds up end to end without the concept eating the music.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents