Haruka Fujii - Ko Ku: Contemporary Japanese - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Percussionist Haruka Fuji has been a longtime collaborator with Tan Dun as soloist in his Water and Paper Percussion Concerto, a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble since 2010, and a founding member of NY-based new music groups Flexible Music and Line C3. She releases her debut solo recording, Ingredients, including several works written for her, by three composers from her native Japan, Joji Yuasa, Maki Ishii and Akemi Naito, and three from her adopted home in the U.S., Ryan Streber, Caroline Mallonee and Carl Schimmel. The works showcase Fujii's virtuoso technique and sensitivity to timbre, and feature pianist Eric Huebner (NY Philharmonic, Flexible Music), as well as Fujii's mother and sister, Mutsuko and Rika, that together form the well regarded Fujii Marimba Trio.

180 gram white colored vinyl LP pressing includes . After the punky heft and wildness of 2014's Hour of the Dawn, an LP that thrashed against expectation, La Sera returns with a set of songs that double down on the power of wry lyrics, glorious guitar, driving backbeat, and the occasional pump organ groove. Ryan Adams joins to produce the fruit of their union, La Sera's first live-recorded analog album, featuring 10 tunes about good love, bad love, dead men, and confused kids. As a testament to the chemistry that happened in that space, Music For Listening to Music To spawned another fruitful relationship Adams and Wisenbaker hit it off and decided to start their own band. Instead they wound up recording a bunch of Taylor Swift covers, which became the 1989 album.

The second volume in this series reveals once again the amazing flair that Japanese composers have for the guitar. It also explores the ways in which the more traditional aspects of the country's music are brought into the sphere of the classical guitar with variety, subtlety and richness. From Toru Takemitsu's popular arrangement of Nakada's A Song of Early Spring through Akira Miyoshi's lyrical Cinq Poemes pour la guitare to Toshio Hosokawa's evocative Serenade the listener encourters unexpected colors and textures as well as evocations of the biwa and shamisen (types of lute) and the koto, a long zither.