Monk, Schubert and free improv: Aki Takase, left, and Daniel Erdmann. Photo: press
Ellington (2024) and Isn’t It Romantic? (2021) precede this latest from an established free-jazz Japanese-German piano/sax duo.
Pianist Aki Takase and reedist Daniel Erdmann hardly treat the past as something fixed, instead the duo approach it as material that can be revisited and transformed in the present.
The programme, sometimes dizzyingly anarchic and feverish (‘Reveal Our Identity’), alternately sphinx-like and inscrutable (‘Niigata’) in its stateliness, combines original compositions notably with a reworking of Thelonious Monk’s ‘In Walked Bud.’
Takase, now 78, was born in the Japanese city of Osaka and has lived in Berlin for decades. She is the wife of the free-jazz icon Alexander von Schlippenbach. Her step-son Vincent von Schlippenbach – who goes under the Künstlername of DJ Illvibe – plays turntables on a couple of tracks.
Erdmann, 52, studied with Takase in Berlin many years ago when she was a visiting professor at the Hanns Eisler School of Music. The Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, born saxist – whose style is a little like English reedist James Allsopp although tonally his sound has even more of a mellow fruitfulness to it – has appeared in a trio called Das Kapital and for me far preferably the group Velvet Revolution which has also roped in the brilliant English vibist/percussionist Jim Hart.
There’s nothing to scare the horses here in terms of Timeless being a difficult listen in case you suspected as much – if avant jazz can be thought of on a scale of 1-10 when 1 is not at all a cacophony but getting more rackety as it climbs the scale and 10 reliably batshit crazy is – I’d give this a 2.
But it is adventurous and there is a healthy respect created to allow freer passages a welcome role as on ‘Miniatur.’
Timeless was recorded in Berlin over two days in 2025. Tune titles include ‘Niigata’, named after the Japanese city that faces the sea of Japan and where its 1920s era Bandai stone bridge crosses Japan’s longest river, the Shinano.
‘Suiteki’ has a more winningly impressionistic quality and it’s the best thing here.
Monk’s Genius of Modern Music tune ‘In Walked Bud’ – a contrafact of Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’ and classic of rhythmic displacement recorded more than a hundred times by others since its genesis at the crucible of bebop in the 1940s – provides a more direct encounter with the jazz tradition. But the whole thing is relatable whether you happen to be a bop or free-jazz nut, neither, all of the above or even a bottom-less brunch type of voracious aural glutton who scoffs at the thought of Ozempic and all moderation.
