Ellington Aki Takase & Daniel Erdmann

• 1 In a Sentimental Moon 05:22
• 2 Perdido 03:32
• 3 Prelude to a Kiss 04:54
• 4 Caravan 04:00
• 5 Iin a Mellow Tone Don't Get Arround Much Anymore 02:49
• 6 I'm Beginning to See a Strange Light 05:06
• 7 African Flower 06:55
• 8 It's Bad to Be Forgotten 02:52
• 9 Come Sunday 06:28
• 10 Cottontail 03:16
• 11 I Let a Song Go out of My Heart 02:24
• 12 Duke Ellington's Sound of Love 02:58
• Total Runtime 50:36

Info for Ellington

Duke Ellington's work - his compositions, his orchestral pieces, the diversity of his work and his piano playing - proved to be an ideal starting point for the duo's playing adventures.

Ellington becomes the common point of reference. Even more than the sheet music, it's about his spirit, which inspired Charles Mingus to write one of his most beautiful pieces - a piece whose title can also be read as the heading for these duo recordings: "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love".

The nature of their interaction can hardly be described as anything other than telepathic. Inventiveness is combined with technical perfection. Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann rehearsed together a lot and it shows. But above all, they have a lot to tell each other and us. The precision with which they master unison and rapid changes in tempo does not stand in the way of flying into the open, but rather opens the doors for it. What began during the pandemic with video connections between the Reims-based saxophonist and the pianist's Berlin apartment was continued live. The two soon realized that with their duo record “Isn’t It Romantic?” they hadn’t said it all yet, but had just made a beginning. The desire for free, personal expression and admiration for the jazz tradition led Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann almost instinctively to Ellington.

Duke Ellington's work - his compositions, his orchestral pieces, the diversity of his work and his piano playing - proved to be an ideal starting point for the duo's playing adventures. Ellington became a fuel for the imagination. The two found a variety of approaches. The spectrum ranges from close proximity to the original to reinterpretations, from variation to deconstruction and alienation to the creation of something completely original, which is no longer inspired by the material of the originals, but by the mood and atmosphere of the compositions or original recordings leaves. Themes by Duke Ellington show the duo the way to the essence of their playing together: improvisation.

Aki Takase's preoccupation with tradition permeates her entire artistic biography. She has studied Fats Waller, W. C. Handy, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and, again and again, Duke Ellington - always with the aim of penetrating deeper into the inner workings of jazz and finding inspiration for her own playing. In addition to the solo, she particularly preferred the duo format. With Daniel Erdmann, who also plays in her band “Japanic”, the path to Ellington in the duo was almost inevitable.

Duke Ellington's music is particularly suitable for the duo excursions because it is so universal and because it occupies a central place in jazz history. Ellington succeeded in bridging the gap between tradition and modernity, from tradition to the avant-garde. Just as Ellington himself referred to the continuum of African-American music, Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann can now also project his work onto his predecessors, his contemporaries and his successors, i.e. place it in a context that extends from ragtime and stride piano Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell to Cecil Taylor, from Schönberg and Stravinsky to Conlon Nancarrow, from Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane to the present day.

Each of the duo pieces opens up a different approach and develops its own color. Swinging happiness stands next to ballad-like passion and romantic melancholy, impressionistic lightness next to dense clouds of sound. All in all, a multi-perspective picture emerges and of course – as with all successful reminiscences in jazz – also a self-portrait, in this case a double portrait. They cut a perfect picture on stage: the tall Daniel Erdmann and the comparatively petite Aki Takase, who is completely engrossed in the piano. But it is only in the musical interaction, in the soulful togetherness, that the exciting psychogram of the duo emerges. Ellington becomes the common point of reference. Even more than the sheet music, it's about the sound, one of the central categories of his work. And above all, it's about his spirit, which inspired Charles Mingus to write one of his most beautiful pieces - a piece whose title can also be read as the heading for these duo recordings: "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love". Bert Noglik

Daniel Erdmann, tenor & soprano saxophone
Aki Takase, piano

Aki Takase
was born in Osaka and grew up in Tokyo. She received piano lessons from the age of three. Piano was also the major subject during her music studies at Tohogakuen University in Tokyo. A longer stay in the USA followed in 1979. In 1981, at the Berlin Jazz Festival in the Philharmonie, the first celebrated performance of her trio with Takeo Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Ino in Germany. Numerous concerts and recordings with Dave Liebman, Sheila Jordan, Cecil McBee, Lester Bowie, Bob Moses, Joe Henderson, Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen and many others. followed.

In the 1990s, they had very successful duos with the singer MARIA JOAO and the saxophonist DAVID MURRAY. Work in a trio with REGGIE WORKMANN and RASHIED ALI, in a duo with ALEX VON SCHLIPPENBACH, as well as occasional projects with the TOKI STREICHQUARTET and the BERLIN CONTEMPORARY JAZZ ORCHESTRA. Currently, especially her collaboration with the bass clarinetist RUDI MAHALL and with the poet YOKO TAWADA, each in a duo, as well as her trio DEMPA (with Aleks Kolkowski and Tony Buck). Aki Takase received UDJ record awards in 1990 (Play Ballads of Duke Ellington), 1991 (Shima Shoka), 1994 (Blue Monk) and 1998 (Duet for Eric Dolphy). From 1997 to 1999 she worked as a visiting professor at the “Hanns Eisler” University of Music in Berlin. In 1999 she received the Berliner Zeitung's Critics' Prize. Aki Takase received the SWR Jazz Prize in 2002. For her release “Aki Takase plays Fats Waller” she was awarded the German Record Critics' Annual Prize for the best jazz production in 2004. Other projects include the trio LOK 03 with Alex von Schlippenbach and DJ Illvibe, duos with Lauren Newton, Silke Eberhard (Ornette Coleman Anthologie), Han Bennink and Louis Sclavis. She has so far received 8 nominations for the German Record Critics' Quarterly Award. In November 2021, Aki Takase was awarded the prestigious Albert Mangelsdorff Prize at the Berlin Jazz Festival.

Daniel Erdmann
was born in Wolfsburg in 1973. He has been playing the saxophone since 1983 and studied with Gebhard Ullmann at the Hanns Eisler University of Music, among others. He recorded albums for various labels, including BMC, ENJA, ACT, LABEL BLEU, INTAKT and plays concerts worldwide with bands and musicians such as Das Kapital, Vincent Courtois, Aki Takase, Carlos Bica, Heinz Sauer, Samuel Rohrer, Henri Texier. In 2014 he founded the German-French company DAS ATELIER and his new band Daniel Erdmann's Velvet Revolution with Théo Ceccaldi and Jim Hart. The band's first album on BMC Records was awarded the German Record Critics' Annual Prize and an Echo Jazz. In autumn 2020, Daniel Erdmann was awarded the renowned SWR Jazz Prize as part of the Enjoy Jazz Festival. In June 2021 he will be the winner of the inaugural German Jazz Prize.

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