Aki Takase

Piano at three, jazz by the back door

Aki Takase was born on 26 January 1948 in Osaka and raised in Tokyo, where she started at the piano aged three and went through the classical training offered by the Toho Gakuen School of Music. Jazz came after that schooling rather than instead of it, which is part of why her playing keeps reaching for written material — opera themes, stride piano, Ellington heads — and then taking it apart.

From 1978 she performed and recorded in the United States, working with musicians including Lester Bowie and John Zorn. The turn came in 1981 with her European debut at the Berlin Jazz Festival. She settled in West Berlin in 1987 and has lived there since, which placed her inside the European free-improvisation circuit at close range rather than visiting it from Tokyo. She also taught improvisation at the Hanns Eisler music academy in Berlin, where the saxophonist Daniel Erdmann — now one of her longest-running partners — was a student in the mid-1990s.

Tributes that argue back

Much of Takase's catalogue is built around a single dead composer at a time, approached as an argument rather than a homage. She made an Ellington project in 1990, a Thelonious Monk project in 1994, an Eric Dolphy project in 1998 and an Ornette Coleman project in 2006. Aki Takase Plays Fats Waller took the German Record Critics' Prize in 2004 and is the one most people reach for first; the critics' award has gone to her nine times between 1988 and 2017.

The duo is her other standing format. Over four decades she has recorded in pairs and small groups with Evan Parker, Han Bennink, David Murray, Rudi Mahall, Louis Sclavis and Eugene Chadbourne, among others. The pattern is consistent: a small number of players, no section writing to hide behind, and compositions short enough that the improvising has to carry the piece.

Two pianists, one instrument

The longest-standing of those partnerships is with Alexander von Schlippenbach, her husband and a founding figure of German free jazz. Promoters now sell the duo on the strength of a shared history of close to 40 years: two pianists in improvised dialogue, with no fixed programme and no formal constraints announced in advance.

The Philharmonie Luxembourg booked them into its Espace Découverte on 11 February 2026 as part of its Jazz Currents strand — 80 minutes, no interval, free seating at €28. ODEON Göppingen, which brings them to the Altes E-Werk on 6 November 2026, bills the set as free improvisation at a single piano and makes the honest point that because the pair play together rarely, each concert amounts to a premiere.

The records of the last five years

Auge, released by Intakt on 15 January 2021 as CD 356, is the piano-trio statement: 14 pieces in about 49 minutes with Christian Weber on bass and Michael Griener on drums, recorded at Traumton Studios in Berlin on 18 and 19 February 2019. Takase's own framing of the record is flat and unromantic — she loves the piano trio because the three players are equal — and Peter Margasak's note on the release credits the group with a command of rhythm and harmony that erases the line between design and spontaneity.

Ellington, a duo with Daniel Erdmann, came out on enja & yellowbird on 15 May 2024: twelve Ellington pieces running from Caravan to African Flower. The two had drifted apart for about 15 years, met again by chance at a Paris airport and resumed playing in 2019, forming the quintet Japanic. The duo work intensified in the 2020 lockdown through weekly rehearsals over Zoom between Reims and Berlin, and the album was recorded in Budapest in August 2020. The pairing won the first Deutscher Jazzpreis in June 2021. In 2023 she turned to Bizet with the mezzo-soprano Mayumi Nakamura on Carmen Rhapsody.

Two further releases arrived inside a year. TANTO, issued by Innocent Records on 18 March 2025, documents a 2022 Tokyo concert with Erdmann and the guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi on guitar and daxophone, alongside live painting; it is four tracks long and opens with a 23-minute piece. Remedy + Aki Takase followed on 1 December 2025 on Fundacja Słuchaj — seven tracks with Thomas Heberer on trumpet, Joe Fonda on bass and flute and Joe Hertenstein on drums, recorded at Jazzanova Recording Studio in Berlin on 2 April 2024. Heberer's sleeve note traces their shared history back to 1988 in the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, and on through Takase's Fats Waller project and a tour of Japan.

April 2026: the prize for the whole thing

On 25 April 2026 Takase received the Deutscher Jazzpreis in the Lebenswerk — lifetime achievement — category at the Congress Centrum Bremen, at a ceremony tied to the 20th anniversary of the jazzahead! trade fair. The citation covered more than five decades of work between Berlin, Tokyo and the international avant-garde, and her movement between composition and improvisation rather than any single record.

Her response was characteristically unsentimental: she said she was proud of the award, that she is probably on the home stretch of her career, and that she hopes she and Alexander can carry on performing as long as possible. The prize sits on top of the SWR Jazz Award in 2002, the Jazzpreis Berlin in 2018, the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize in 2021 and a Deutscher Jazzpreis as a pianist in the same year.

The autumn and winter diary

The touring has not thinned out after the prize. On 21 October 2026 she played the İBB Cemal Reşit Rey hall in Istanbul at 8pm with Japanic — Erdmann on saxophone, Vincent von Schlippenbach, working as DJ Illvibe, on turntables, Johannes Fink on bass and Dag Magnus Narvesen on drums — a set the promoter described as running jazz-history rhythms through hip-hop and free improvisation, drawing on the band's 2019 album Thema Prima.

Germany takes the rest of the year. The Schlippenbach duo plays the Altes E-Werk in Göppingen on 6 November 2026 (doors 7pm, music 8pm, advance tickets €32, €28 and €16), the small Berlin room Sowieso on 11 November, and the Fabrik in Potsdam on 4 December, with a solo-billed date at Schloss Engers in Neuwied on 13 November. Earlier in the year she had taken the Carmen material to the Kammgarn in Schaffhausen on 28 May 2026, in a 360-degree staging co-presented with the Jazzfestival Schaffhausen.