Aki Takase & Daniel Erdmann

In the organizer's words:

Ellington!

The way they play together can hardly be described as anything other than telepathic. They combine inventiveness with technical perfection. Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann have rehearsed a lot together, and you can tell. But above all, they have a lot to tell each other and us. The precision with which they master unisons and rapid tempo changes does not stand in the way of their flight into the open, but rather opens the doors to it. What began during the pandemic with video calls between the Reims-based saxophonist and the pianist's Berlin apartment continued live. The two soon realized that their duo record "Isn't It Romantic?" was by no means the end of the story, but just the beginning. The desire for free, individual expression and admiration for the jazz tradition led Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann almost instinctively to Ellington.
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 building a bridge from the traditional to the modern, from the traditional to the avant-garde. Just as Ellington himself referred to the continuum of African-American music, Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann can now project his work onto his predecessors, his contemporaries and his successors, placing it in a context that ranges from ragtime and stride piano to Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell to Cecil Taylor, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Conlon Nancarrow, from Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane and the present day.