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 began taking piano lessons at the age of three and majored in piano during her studies at Toho Gakuen University in Tokyo. A lengthy stay in the USA followed in 1979; in 1981, she made her European debut and gave an acclaimed performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival (at the Philharmonie) with her trio, featuring Takeo Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Ino. She has undertaken numerous tours and recordings with Dave Liebman, Sheila Jordan, Cecil McBee, Lester Bowie, Fred Frith, Otomo Yoshihide, Bob Moses, Joe Henderson, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, John Scofield, and many others.

In the 1990s, she formed highly successful duos and toured worldwide with vocalist Maria João and saxophonist David Murray. She also performed in a trio with Reggie Workman and Rashied Ali, in duos with Alex von Schlippenbach, and in projects with the Toki String Orchestra.

RECORD AWARDS AND PROJECTS: Aki Takase received the UDJ Award in 1990, 1991, 1994, and 1998. From 1997 to 1999, she served as a guest lecturer at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin. In 1998, she was awarded the *Berliner Zeitung* Critics' Prize. Her solo CD *Le Cahier du Bal* (Leo Records) was released in 2001, as was her "W.C. Handy Project"—titled *St. Louis Blues* (Enja Records) and featuring Rudi Mahall, Nils Wogram, Fred Frith, and Paul Lovens—which won the SWR Jazz Prize in 2002.

In 2004, she received the prestigious Annual Award of the German Record Critics. Since then, numerous new projects have emerged, including duos with Alexander von Schlippenbach, Lauren Newton, Han Bennink, Silke Eberhard, and Louis Sclavis, as well as trios such as LOK 03 (Alexander von Schlippenbach & DJ Illvibe), TAMA (Jan Roder and Oliver Steidle), Aki and the Good Boys, and the La Planète Quartet with Louis Sclavis, Vincent Courtois, and Dominique Pifarély, to name but a few.

She is one of the most creative jazz artists of our time. For years, she has collaborated with the extraordinary dancer Yui Kawaguchi on her ongoing project "Die Stadt im Klavier" (The City in the Piano). Aki Takase received the Berlin Jazz Award in 2018, and in 2021, she was honored with the German Jazz Prize for Best Solo Artist (Piano/Keyboards) as well as the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize.

Daniel Erdmann
was born in Wolfsburg in 1973. He has been playing the saxophone since 1983 and studied under Gebhard Ullmann, among others, at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin. He has recorded albums for various labels—including BMC, ENJA, ACT, Label Bleu, and Intakt—and performs worldwide with bands and musicians such as Das Kapital, Vincent Courtois, Aki Takase, Carlos Bica, Heinz Sauer, Samuel Rohrer, and Henri Texier. In 2014, he founded the Franco-German company DAS ATELIER and his new band, Daniel Erdmann’s Velvet Revolution, featuring Théo Ceccaldi and Jim Hart. The band’s debut album on BMC Records won the Annual Award of the German Record Critics and an Echo Jazz award. In the autumn of 2020, Daniel Erdmann was awarded the prestigious SWR Jazz Prize as part of the Enjoy Jazz Festival. In June 2021, he became a recipient of the inaugural German Jazz Prize.

Berlin-based Japanese pianist Aki Takase and saxophonist Daniel Erdmann first met in the mid-1990s, when Takase was teaching improvisation at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin and Erdmann was a student there. In 2000, Erdmann received a scholarship from the Franco-German Cultural Council and moved to Paris—marking the temporary end of his collaboration with the influential pianist. Fifteen years later, the two ran into each other by chance at a Paris airport. There, they agreed to finally play together again. That same year, Takase founded the quintet "Japanic," which released the album *Thema Prima* in 2019.

The pair began their duo collaboration in 2019 and intensified it during the first coronavirus lockdown in the spring of 2020. Despite the restrictions and technical challenges, there was a silver lining: the opportunity to focus entirely on the project. Writing about their first concert in France for the *Libération* newspaper’s jazz blog, Bruno Pfeiffer noted: "Complex chords and masterful melodies, combined with a sense of shared rapport—like two runners crossing the finish line hand in hand. By the end, the duo leaves us with an urge to dance."

This album contains no booklet.