Aki Takase and Ingrid Laubrock on Intakt

courtesy of Naxos of America

I realize that I have not written about jazz pianist Aki Takase since the days when I seemed to be following her regularly as part of my Examiner.com activities. Born in Osaka in 1948, Takase became a major avant-garde figure in the United States after moving there in 1978, working with such adventurous music-makers as Lester Bowie and John Zorn. She gave her first performance in Europe at the 1981 Berlin Jazz Festival, remaining in Germany to marry another jazz pianist, Alexander von Schlippenbach. She has been living in Brooklyn since 2008.

It was through Takase that I first became aware of the Zürich-based Intakt Records label. It was through that label that Takase returned to my radar when it released Kasumi, a duo album that she made with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. The Amazon.com Web page for this album describes it as presenting “wonderful dialogues, which radiate joy, wit and warmth or hold the breath in silent intensity, so as not to break the spell.”

Note that this quotation does not say anything about spontaneity. It would be fair to say that both Laubrock and Takase are highly skilled improvisers and that each is well aware of the other’s approaches to improvisation. This should be sufficient to approach the exchanges on each of the fourteen tracks of Kasumi as an interaction in which each player has basic ground rules for what to expect from the improvisations of the other.

It is also worth noting that all of the individual tracks are on the short side. The shortest track, “Scurry,” is less than one and one-half minutes in duration, while the longest, “Sunken Forest,” is a little more than six and one-half minutes. One can imagine two possible strategies behind the making of the Kasumi album. The first is that Laubrock and Takase went into a studio and simply poured out a sequence of these short takes, all of which were recorded. Fourteen of them were selected and then assigned titles. Alternatively, the duo could have come up with the titles first, using each as a trigger for its own improvised exchange.

Either way, it is easy to appreciate the playfulness behind each of the tracks. Indeed, the music itself is so accommodatingly flexible that, with the aid of the track title, it is easy to dream up an appropriate “topic of conversation” behind each of the dialogues. One can play this game any number of times with each of the tracks without necessarily coming up with the same “topic” each time. That is what make the session so playful for the performers and so much fun for the listeners.