In Lockdown Tape #17 Marco Blaauw plays a piece by the Japanese composer Dai Fujikura. Here Marco describes the thoughts and associations that go through his mind when playing this piece and what might develop from it in the future.

“I have a lot of childhood memories of looking up into the sky and stare at cloud formations that form figures and characters, eventually developing into real stories. I still often catch myself staring into the sky. Nowadays I feel less time to wait for the clouds to change their forms. I take shorter glances, where my eyes search and wonder. Sometimes it is just functional, to find out what clothes to wear for going out, mostly it is just a searching without knowing for what.

The sky always looks different, with so much movement, so many colours. No matter how often I look up, it never is the same, and it never gives my eyes a clue of what they were searching for, let be tell me what coat to wear …  Instead, the sky leaves me in awe, astonished how big the world around me is, how small I am and above all, how little I understand of everything that happens around me …

Inkling is a short work. The composer Dai Fujikura composes with only one material, that consists of a very soft shimmering, a short but very beautiful melody. Like a cloud this melody passes by and then gets a lot louder and suddenly stops: it opens a big space leaves the listener in awe and astonishment …

I had met Dai once in 2005, and had had no direct contact to him since then. To tell him that I wanted to record his work for our Lockdown Tapes series, I had to search for his contact on Facebook. He reacted immediately and at first astonished, ‘oh, such an old piece …’, but was grateful and enthusiastic. After that, my questions were quickly followed by his answers: can I play the color changes on the double bell trumpet? ‘please do so! Amazing!’ Can I add guitar effect pedals? ‘haha, I just composed for trumpet, trombone and e guitar …, do it, that sounds amazing’. Within a few minutes a lively dialogue developed which is still going on: this work is now to become a nucleus from which further works for trumpet are to grow in the near future.”

Marco Blaauw, June 2020