St. Louis Blues

Aki Takase was born in Osaka and grew up in Tokyo. She alresady had piano- lessons when she was three years old. Piano was her main subject during her studies at the Tohogakuen University in Tokyo. 1979 she had a longer stay in the U.S.A. 1981 at the Jazz-festival in the philarmony of Berlin, the first celebrated performance with her trio featuring Takeo Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Ino in germany. Numerous concerts and recordings with Dave Liebman, Sheila Jordan, Cecil McBee, Lester Bowie, Bob Moses, Joe Henderson, Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen and many more followed. In the nnetees for years very successfull duos with the singer MARIA JOAO, and with the saxophonist DAVIA MURRAY. Work in trio with REGGIE WORKMANN and RASHIED ALI in duet with ALEX von SCHLIPPENBACH, as well as occasional projects with the TOKI STRING ORCHESTA. Actual is above all her co- operation with the bass- clarinettist RUDI MAHALL as well as with the lyricist YOK TAWADA, each time a duo, and also her trio DEMPA (with Aleks Kolkowski and Tony Buck). Record- prizes of the UDJ Aki Takase got in 1990 (Play Ballads of Duke Ellington), 1991 (Shima Shoka), 1994 (Blue Monk), and 1998 (Duet for Eric Dolphy). From 1997 to 1999 she worked as guest-lecturer at the university for music "Hanns Eisler " in Berlin. 1998 she received the critic-prize of the "Berliner newspaper". In the year 2001 her Solo-CD'S "Le Cahier du Bal "(Leo Records) was published as well as her "W.C.Handy-Project" with Rudi Mahall, Nils Wogram, Fred Frith and Paul Lovens under the name "St. Louis Blues" (Enja Records).“St Louis Blues” has been awarded the GERMAN CRITICS PRICE I/2002 “Nothing new about Jazz? Maybe, that there will never be again an avant-garde in the militaric sense of pioneers, which the footman follow in a certain distance. But the big individualists, who in a personal union of creator and interpreter always determined the aura of Jazz like in no other music genre, are still there. And if they play in top form, what isn't always possible, they are irresistible and unique. Aki Takase for example, who always can produce her bizarre humour at it' s best, when she chooses brilliant Duo- partners and rubs herself at the utmost popular themes of others. This is what she does now with themes of the componist of many blues-classics, W.C.Handy. With Rudi Mahall Aki Takase has an old friendship of " happy resonance vibrations", which resulted 1998 in the masterpiece " Duet for Eric Dolphy". Dolphy gave in the beginning of the 60's the bass clarinet as a new courted instrument a new home in the Jazz. But Intonation and common playing are difficult, and in extreme articulations relations with excited goose disturb the sense for art. Therefore there are few, which the 1964-deceased Dolphy would have given the dubbing. Rudi Mahall is one of them. The Dolphy- theme which Takase and Mahall treated at her first co- operation, was very complicated, but the pieces of W.C.Handy are evergreens, nearly easy like children songs, especially the " St. Louis Blues", which formally seen isn't even a blues and the CD, on which he is performed two times has the name of this blues. Those melodies are very suitable as playmaterial for shrill phantasies and satirical lust. Thoughtful there plays a southern- state piano, while the bass- clarinet plays out off all harmonies. Honky- Tonk, musical box- idyll and slapstick- panic are undermined by Free- Jazz- experience, but free dialogues are intercepted again in strange arrangements; on all sides break outs, excesses, unseriousness, playfully, holded together in it's heart by brilliant trade, which has an effect on the tone colour arrangement at Mahall and at Nils Wogram, too. The most intellectual German trombonist with the best technique, is as completion of the group an enormous enrichment. Wogram demonstrated in the formation "Underkarl" a related humour in the management of tradition like Aki Takase does. On the other side the dry deconstructions of the guitarist Fred Frith and the cranky drum- playing of Paul Lovens -they are occasional performers -fit very well too in the spiritual and ghost- world of the Japanese pianist. For her CD Aki Takase herself composed but Mahall and Wogram, too. With "Lulu's back in town" she gave a hit- song, which is not from W.C. Handy, free to be slured. ” Ulrich Olshausen in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung 28. December 2001