Pianist/composer Sumi Tonooka reveals the secret world of trees and the underground connections that bind society in the breathtaking suite Under the Surface, a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission, available June 27 via ARC.Album features Tonooka’s trio with Gregg August and Johnathan Blake plus Alchemy Sound Project
Sumi Tonooka looks for the submerged truths and unseen networks that nourish our world. The renowned Philadelphia composer and pianist has been most visible in recent years writing commissions for symphony orchestras and crafting new works for her trio. With Under the Surface, out June 27, 2025 via ARC, various Tonookian worlds converge in an extended work that embodies the interlaced web of connections that manifest beneath our feet and on neighborhood bandstands.
A suite inspired by the roots of trees and the fungi-supported mycorrhizal network that allows them to support the survival of all nearby trees (even outside of their own species), Under the Surface is built on Tonooka’s volatile trio with supremely versatile bassist Gregg August and special guest drum star Johnathan Blake, who also hails from Philadelphia. In giving shape to Tonooka’s compositions, Blake embodies the album’s concept as he’s both the music’s engine and “part of my personal musical family and network,” Tonooka says.
“For 30-plus years I played with his father, the great jazz violinist John Blake, and I knew Johnathan as a boy.” Now, he’s one of the premier drummers of his generation “and firmly holds the baton or mycorrhizal energy to pass off to the next generations,” she says.
While Tonooka’s mycorrhizal concept might sound esoteric, it couldn’t be more grounded. The music flows from the essential web of relationships that allow musicians to connect, flourish and improvise together. Composed during the early months of Covid with the support of a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant, the suite took shape as both a tribute to and reflection on the way people reached out to help each other through the crisis.
Writing for the Alchemy Sound Project, a diverse multi-generational collective that’s served as a sonic laboratory in recent years, Tonooka took care to highlight the particular gifts of her collaborators: tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay, trumpeter Samantha Boshnack, trombonist Michael Ventoso, and Salim Washington on tenor sax, bass clarinet and flute.
The album opens with the trio on “Points Of Departure,” a joy ride that immediately establishes Blake’s textural command and Tonooka’s adventurous spirit. She credits her recent work in groups led by pianist and Philly mainstay Bobby Zankel, an improviser deeply shaped by years under the wing of Cecil Taylor, with honing her skills in unstructured settings. “There’s no chart in terms of the chords,” she says. “We play a theme and just start to go.”
With Ventoso’s extended wah-wah opening, “Saveur” brings to mind an Ellingtonian rhapsody. The multi-section piece features a long trio passage marked by beautifully calibrated dynamics, and the kinetic interplay between Blake and Lindsay’s poised tenor. At 11 minutes, the suite’s centerpiece and longest movement, “Interval Haiku,” opens with a dissonant, unhurried fanfare featuring the horns that soon gives way to a briskly swinging piano trio passage. Before long we’re back in the woods with a series of solos, led by Boshnack’s expressive trumpet. Thick with wide intervallic movement, these woods are deep, inviting and mysterious.
The action slows to a sensuous saunter with the lapidary ballad “Tear Bright,” which moves from Ventoso’s wending trombone solo to Washington’s lustrous bass clarinet passage. With “Mother Tongue,” the sylvan idyll turns frantic, as the dense mid-tempo piece feels like a trap the musicians seek to navigate. A thicket of melodic lines driven by August’s Latin-powered bass converge as Washington’s flute soars above and Ventoso’s trombone searches the soil. There’s no mincing of words in the intricacies of “Mother Tongue,” but with “For Stanley,” Tonooka offers a simple, heartfelt love letter to the late piano great Stanley Cowell, who died while she was composing the suite.
She was in her early 20s when she got a grant to study with him, and he became an important mentor. “I loved his music, and he introduced me to Akira Tana, because he was playing with the Heath Brothers with Akira,” she said, referring to the great drummer with whom she recorded her first two albums. “He had many musical identities. The last time I saw him was a concert I did with Jon Blake, and I wanted to honor him and his influence on me.”
The suite closes with the title movement, the brisk, inviting and often witty “Under The Surface.” A duo passage between Blake and Washington concludes with a reference to the “Girl From Ipanema,” a cheeky quote that takes us back to the origin of all life, the sea.
In many ways the path to Under the Surface runs through Tonooka’s involvement in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, a program designed to foster connections between jazz artists and symphony orchestras. Encouraged to apply by Lindsay, who’d participated in the JCOI’s inaugural 2012 session, Tonooka thrived in the program. She was one of a few JCOI composers whose work was selected for a premiere, which led to the American Composers Orchestra presenting her piece “Full Circle” in New York City.
Alchemy Sound Project coalesced during her JCOI residency at UCLA, where she connected with players like Detroit-reared Salim Washington, a commanding multi-instrumental improviser who has since become chair of global jazz studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Tonooka recruited Lindsay, with whom she was already co-leading a quartet that records for the label they co-founded, Artists Recording Collective, or ARC. An artist-in-residence at Bard College, Lindsay had mentored JCOI participants Michael Ventoso and Samantha Boshnack, who leads several notable ensembles on Seattle’s creatively charged jazz scene.
The idea for Alchemy Sound Project came to Tonooka in the midst of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute residency “hanging out with the other composers during our free time,” she said. “I was thinking, what if we wrote for each other and learned and performed each other’s music? The idea was to give ourselves a community, even a small one, to develop our own work.”
Tonooka’s jazz education took place mostly on the bandstand. By 17, she was writing prolifically for a trio she was leading around Philadelphia featuring future bass star Jamaaladeen Tacuma. Drum legend Philly Joe Jones was so impressed he recruited her for a two-year stint in his band.
Moving to New York City in 1983, Tonooka gained considerable attention as a major new voice, eventually making her recording debut as a leader on 1990’s With An Open Heart, a trio session with Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid. Before she started down the orchestral path, Tonooka had also composed scores for about 20 films. One reason Underneath the Surface sounds so cohesive is that Alchemy Sound Project honed the music during its first tour in 2024. As she says with a wink, after all the orchestral writing, touring and recording the suite represents “a return to my roots.”
“This record is a good representation of a lot of what I’ve learned in the past 10 years, exploring orchestration and 20th century music,” she says. It also embodies an alternative vision for social cohesion, a “wood wide web” that takes the mycorrhizal metaphor from nature and applies it to human endeavors, “turning the notion of survival of the fittest on its head to mean that the strong reach out to help the weak and the damaged, fostering a collective cooperation and supporting the whole,” Tonooka says. “In other words, humans need each other and must work together to survive and thrive, just like trees.”
https://sumitonooka.com/
Thank you to Ann Braithwaite for sharing with us
