Hitomi Nishiyama: Dot
Dot is the 2023 album by pianist/composer Hitomi Nishiyama. Until this week’s release of Echo, Dot was her latest album; Echo is Dot’s twin, recorded with the same members and during the same sessions.
Nishiyama has released many great albums since 2004, and yet it is tempting to call this significant Dot her masterpiece. As a prolific composer with consistent album releases over two decades, many peaks have been reached. Dot forges into some bold new territory, and successfully so.
With an acoustic piano trio as a base, Nishiyama’s concepts are wider, open, more abstract. Four tracks feature a piano/bass/drums trio, and five tracks add clarinet, violin, and saxophone/flute for extra layers of artistic splashes. The sextet, with wind and strings, paints dappled backdrops and textured backgrounds on her canvas, and at a few particular moments, even converges as the ethereal resonance of metal fatigue and shearing.
Although not purely ambient nor experimental, some of her music on Dot verges more in that direction with ECM-style touches than ever before. As an example, regular in-time rhythms played by drummer Noritake are balanced with long periods of free and abstract swashes of sound, fluid spaciousness reminiscent of Paul Motian.
Take the beginning, with dreamy blossoming and dissolving on track #1 “Turtledove” and continuing into the hypnotic spell of track #2 “Dot”, a steady drum beat doesn’t appear until the last third of the absorbing, multi-part second track. “Dot” (available to listen to in a video included below) starts with a moderated stream of repeated piano notes, played like the careful picking of a single guitar string. It’s almost like a guitar riff, chugging and shifting through four frets to build the four-pitch melody with an embedded offset. Nishiyama’s attraction to heavy metal music likely influenced her here, as with her separate acoustic jazz piano trio project N.H.O.R.H.M. which focuses on heavy metal covers.
This riff-based approach is subtle and not overplayed, but also appears on another highlight, track #8 “Baroness”. With an edgily modern, semi-medieval feel, lightly crunching chords turn around four corners similarly to set up a riff, the harmonic frame for a melody to play out in graceful curves and more repeated-note dot patterns.
Other songs on the album plunge on in swing and straight eights. #3 “The Rider” and #6 “Red and Yellow” are particularly catchy and comfortably grounded with Mehldauesque intricacy and depth, comfortable stops between the more unbounded reaches of the album.
Those adventurous corners include the dramatic, up-close experience of #5 “Tidal”, where vamps of rolling chords and turbulent drums together with the sextet’s improvisations summon ominous waves of sound like oceanic forces.
For more variety, there is even slight melodic and rhythmic quirkiness included. Track #4 “To Return” is a playful swing with an unhurried, Monkish sense. Track #7 “Pigeons” reflects the bouncy personalities of those odd birds, a comical jazz waltz on cobblestones.
The journey leads to the last track, #8 “Lighthouse”. This restful end provides an adventure’s conclusion through a liltingly pretty melody passed from clarinet to bowed double bass, to piano, and back again as drums lightly color in accents and timbres across the set.
What about Dot? Is this innocent word a hidden theme or message for the album? Music notes written as dots on a staff? Pointillistic art that approximates waveforms and curves, backgrounds and landscapes? A blemish, a beauty mark, a pixel, typographic symbol, piece of code? Atoms creating form as they group and assemble? The repeating, somber yet heartening beep of a machine monitoring a pulse? Or maybe, simply the end of a sentence.
There are also the dot-like sequences of melody in some of the songs. And, there is the single extended note that ends the album, the last note of “Lighthouse” played in unison by the sextet, a fading dot beamed out to show the way home.
Dot by Hitomi Nishiyama
Hitomi Nishiyama - piano
Toru Nishijima - bass
Ryo Noritake - drums
Takanori Suzuki - clarinet (#2, 3, 5, 6, 9)
Ryosuke Hashizume - tenor saxophone (#3, 5, 6, 9), flute (#2)
maiko - violin (#2, 3, 5, 6, 9)
Released in 2023 on Meantone Records as MT-12
Japanese names: Hitomi Nishiyama 西山瞳 (Nishiyama Hitomi) Toru Nishijima 西嶋徹 (Nishijima Toru) Ryo Noritake 則武諒 (Noritake Ryo) Takanori Suzuki 鈴木孝紀 (Suzuki Takanori) Ryosuke Hashizume 橋爪亮督 (Hashizume Ryosuke) maiko マイコ (maiko)
Related Albums
Hitomi Nishiyama Trio: Many Seasons (2007)
Hitomi Nishiyama Trio: Music in You (2011)
Hitomi Nishiyama Trio: Sympathy (2013)
Daiki Yasukagawa Trio: Trios II (2015)
Hitomi Nishiyama Trio "Parallax": Live (2016)
NHORHM: New Heritage of Real Heavy Metal -Extra Edition- (2019)
Hitomi Nishiyama: Vibrant (2020)
Kaoru Azuma / Hitomi Nishiyama: Faces (2020)
Hitomi Nishiyama Trio: Calling (2021)
Audio and Video
Excerpt from “The Rider”, track #3 on this album: