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Pianist Aki Takase is one of the most important instrumentalists of our time. After last year's acclaimed performance with her long-time musical as well as marriage partner Alexander von Schlippenbach, we are pleased to invite the important pianist, composer and pedagogue again in a duo formation. This time, however, not as a piano duo, but as a saxophone duo.
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AKI TAKASE am Flügel spielend
Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann have known each other for quite some time now; among other things, the master was one of Erdmann's teachers at the renowned Hochschule für Musik Berlin. From this grew an invigorating musical collaboration, which the two recently recorded on a joint CD in 2021.
"Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann know each other well from before and better through their recent collaboration in the quintet Japanic. And they obviously get along so fantastically as a duo as well, producing musical gems on equal footing. Musically Isn't It Romantic? has such a freshness that after listening you can go into the day snapping and in a good mood, as well as highly concentrated and inspired (as probably are the two musicians*). - Jan Kobrzinowski, Jazzthetik 07/2021
Aki Takase was born in Osaka and grew up in Tokyo. She received piano lessons from the age of three. After studies in Tokyo and the USA, the first celebrated performance of her trio with Takeo Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Ino in Germany followed in 1981 at the Berlin Jazz Festival in the Philharmonie. 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 nineties she had very successful duos with the singer Maria Joao as well as with the saxophonist David Murry. She also worked in trio with Reggie Workman and Rashied Ali. From 1997 to 1999 she worked as a guest professor at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin. In 1999 she received the Critics' Prize of the Berliner Zeitung. Aki Takase received the SWR Jazz Prize in 2002. Furthermore she received 4 record awards of the Union of German Jazz Musicians. For her CD "Aki Takase plays Fats Waller" she was awarded the annual prize of the German Record Critics for the best jazz production in 2004.
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 Academy 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 won the German Record Critics' Annual Award and an Echo Jazz. Other awards included the SWR Jazz Prize in 2020 and the German Jazz Prize for Woodwinds in 2021.
