courtesy of Naxos of America
About a month ago the Zürich-based Intakt Records label released the debut album of the AUGE (the German noun for “eye,” see Harald Naegeli’s design for the cover above) trio. This jazz group consists of pianist Aki Takase with Christian Weber on bass and Michael Griener on drums. I first started writing about Takase in September of 2013 during my time with Examiner.com. My “first contact” was with her solo piano album My Ellington. Since then I have tried to keep up with her many imaginative ways of making music.
Takase has made it clear that AUGE is not one of those trios in which bass and drums provide “accompaniment” (perhaps in the spirit of a “jazz continuo”) for the pianist. The new album consists of fourteen tracks recorded at the Traumton Studios in Berlin on February 18 and 19 of 2019. Ten of those tracks involve “joint creativity,” covering a diversity of styles and expressive dispositions.
As might be expected, all three of the performers command an extensive toolbox of technical skills. What is most important, however, is the facility with which those diverse skills interconnect with each other. Conversation is often invoked as a metaphor for group improvisation. However, the conversations that unfold over the course of this album are closer in nature to what one encounters in Plato’s “Symposium” than in the more mundane chit-chat about “everyday life.” This is not to say that the AUGE tracks are overly intellectual but simply that one comes away feeling that no word in this conversation is uttered unless it matters for something.
As a result, this is one of those albums that can stand up to multiple listening experiences, each of which is likely to turn up perspectives or thoughts that had not been previously encountered; for my part, I am still trying to figure out whether one of Takase’s brief piano phrases in the final track (“The End Justifies the Means”) had been deliberately appropriated from Maurice Ravel’s “La valse!”
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