Aki Takase: Timeless Ensemble

Aki Takase: Timeless Ensemble

Thursday, 2 July at 23.00 – CD Klub
Free entry till full capacity

Aki Takase, piano; Daniel Erdmann, saxophones; Vincent von Schlippenbach aka DJ IllVibe, turntables; Carlos Bica, double bass; Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums
(JP, DE, NO)

“Time is the central theme of the program. What is time? What is silence? How malleable is time? Perhaps we can even travel to the future and the past with the help of music?”

These are the questions at the core of the new project by the unrivalled epitome of pianism – or, without exaggeration, a true piano legend – Aki Takase. Her life’s journey has taken her from Tokyo to the United States and Berlin; as early as the 1980s, she collaborated with figures as eminent as John Scofield, Lester Bowie, and Dave Liebman, and in the 1990s performed extensively with David Murray and Reggie Workman, among others. Her credentials are simply too extensive to enumerate here.
Collaborations are therefore an essential, almost indispensable principle of Takase’s creative process. When she encountered her former student Daniel Erdmann at a Paris airport, a musical partnership emerged spontaneously. They began as a duo and soon expanded into an enlarged musical organism: the exceptional quintet JAPANIC.

Now they are taking things even further, moving toward the “Timeless Orchestra.” It is an ensemble of cross-generational musicians. It is both a project of passing on experience to younger generations and a project of projection: where is our music heading? What is happening now, and what might the future bring? Linear time is interrupted as the finest elements of the past are connected with visions of the future at the crux of the present. “Timeless” thus becomes an open structure that invites young musicians to collaborate with their older peers. An extravagant avant-garde initiative!