For 2 Akis is the ECM debut of a Japanese-French-German trio based in Munich, led by the drummer and composer Shinya Fukumori. His attention to timbre, detail and space shapes both his drumming and his free-floating ballads. Beside his own pieces, the trio arranges Japanese songs of the Shōwa era that Fukumori grew up hearing from his parents and grandparents, reworked in a European improvising style.
Fukumori was born in Osaka in 1984 and took up the drums at fifteen. He studied in the United States, finishing at Berklee in Boston, then moved to Munich with the aim of recording for ECM. Around him are the French tenor saxophonist Matthieu Bordenave, whose tone sounds deceptively fragile, and the German pianist Walter Lang, a frequent duo partner of Lee Konitz. The album was recorded in March 2017 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines by Gérard de Haro and produced by Manfred Eicher. The title honours two people called Aki at Interplay 8, an Osaka jazz club, who encouraged Fukumori before he left for Europe.
The album opens and closes with Hoshi Meguri No Uta (The Star-Circling Song) by the poet and writer Kenji Miyazawa. In The Light Suite, Fukumori reharmonises Rentaro Taki's Kojo No Tsuki, once recorded by Thelonious Monk, before it flows into two pieces of his own. There mallets draw soft sounds from the drums, the piano casts shadows and the saxophone leads. Mangetsu No Yube (Full Moon Night) was written after the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake as a song of hope. The title track, one of Fukumori's first rubato pieces, gives the drums the lead before the trio builds to a swell. Lang contributes two compositions and Bordenave one, Émeraude.
Robert Shore wrote in Jazzwise that the trio floats "delicate ideas into a vast, empty, quietly optimistic landscape". Mark Maxwell of DownBeat heard few pyrotechnics, "just three talented and fully engaged musicians playing meaningful tunes with honesty, subtlety and emotion." Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews compared Fukumori's understated drumming to Paul Motian.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2574, first released on 16 February 2018.
