‘I want to show with this music that our time is not easy,” says the indomitably inventive 71-year-old pianist Aki Takase, “but that you can still play prolifically and happily.” The description perfectly fits the music on this vivaciously inviting album, and from much of her five-decade career, too. Pushing contemporary music’s envelopes while intriguing the uninitiated with tempting glimpses of the familiar has long been the Osaka-born improviser/composer’s personal kind of magic.
In the early 1970s, the classically-schooled Takase began considering a post-conservatoire enchantment with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and the implacable genius of Thelonious Monk, alongside contemporary-classical ideas from the likes of Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. She played with Japan’s jazz elite and with American stars including Joe Henderson and Dave Liebman – and with German free-jazz pioneer and husband-to-be Alexander von Schlippenbach on the then burgeoning European free-jazz circuit, following her 1987 move to Berlin. That rich background, marshalled by a stunning piano technique, has made Takase the inquisitive, genre-vaulting jazz adventurer she remains to this day.
Thema Prima was recorded in Budapest for her 70th birthday celebrations in 2018, with a younger-generation German/Norwegian quartet including turntablist Vincent von Schlippenbach (AKA DJ Illvibe).
Catchy hooks, freefall improv, raw noise and cryptic vocals barge and bustle. Traffic Jam’s flinty chord-theme and bass line gallop give way to church bells and a folk melody. The ostinato-pounding title track is an exhilarating standout, while Wüstenschiff turns a folksy Balkan lilt into a guttural rap. Takase and saxophonist Daniel Erdmann inventively freewheel through the post-boppish Hello Welcome, while the old-school stride-rhythm prance of Madam Bum Bum recalls the open-minded leader’s enthusiasm for Fats Waller. It’s a wilfully intoxicating jazz brew that only Takase could have stirred in quite this way.
Also out this month
Rolling piano vamps or backbeat snaps under languid tenor-sax themes, poignant ballads, and punchy hard-bop mark saxophone giant Joshua Redman’s fine reunion with his early-noughties quartet, including pianist Aaron Goldberg on Come What May. UK saxist/composer Trish Clowes takes 2016 sci-fi movie Arrival as her inspiration for the waywardly agile and organ-hummingly brooding tunes, slow-burn guitar breaks, and cool sax meditations on Ninety Degrees Gravity. And ever-mesmerising guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan are conversationally live in New York on jazz classics and even You Only Live Twice, on new album Epistrophy.
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