For those unaware, no previous album in their 14-year history will prepare you for the gleeful lunacy of Shishiodoshi (July 11, 2025 via Circum/Libra), the latest CD from Kaze, the cooperative quartet featuring Japanese composer-pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura along with French trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins.

With guest vocalist Koichi Makigami along for the ride, Kaze unleashes an inspired blend of serious music-making and quirky humor. “We had so much fun making this record!” Fujii says. “Koichi brought something unique to the music and it made us play differently.”

Kaze and Makigami, a legend of Japanese avant-rock and sometime collaborator with free improvisers, first met several years ago when Kaze performed at Jazz Art Sengawa, a festival for which Makigami is an artistic director. But they didn’t play together until early last year during Kaze’s tour of Japan. When Fujii learned that Makigami was going to be in Europe in the late spring, she invited him to join Kaze for a concert in Lille, the home of Pruvost and Orins.

1. Make a Change (25:15)
2. Shishiodoshi (19:19)
3. Inspiration 2 (16:26)

With all this music compiled here veritably teeming with a vitality that embraces life in all its glorious absurdity, the musical wonderment opens on the organically improvised, at times energetically interacted, at others symbolically textured, and yet all coming together with an amazing set of vocal acrobatics that allow a kaleidoscope of sumptuous proportions to be showcased within the 25 minute Make a Change and then we are brought forth the rhythmically abstract, slower tempo of the 20 minute title track Shishiodoshi (its name taken from a common sight in Japanese gardens — a water-filled bamboo tube that clacks against a stone when emptied), everything rounding out and coming to a close on the quietly evocative early on, latterly more intensely earthy, all sensationally hued with a profoundly intense vocal session from Makigami on the 16 minute Inspiration 2.

Kaze @ Facebook