This CD is a dialogue between two musicians sensitive to the problems of the world, where the saxophone and piano not only concur, but sometimes even dare to contradict one another. Aki Takase and Daniel Erdmann were teacher and pupil but became colleagues, and following the quartet Japanic, they are now recording as a duo, in the studios of BMC Records. The album Isn’t it romantic? points whimsically back to the history of jazz through the most personal stories, and all the while their playing is marked by clear contours, romance, a story-telling bent, and spontaneity.

Aki Takase, a Japanese pianist living in Berlin, and Daniel Erdmann, a saxophonist of German origin, first met in the mid 1990s, when Takase taught improvisation in the Hanns Eisler School of Music, Berlin, where Erdmann was studying jazz. As a result of this meeting Aki Takase invited Erdmann to join her sextet, where they played together until Erdmann’s other commitments took him to Paris. Fifteen years later, however, they bumped into each other by chance at an airport in Paris, and that same year they founded the Japanic quartet, with which they released their first album Thema Prima in 2019 on the BMC label. The next logical step seemed to be to continue as a duo. The compositions were written especially for this lineup, and are swathed in an atmosphere of concentrated calm. Though the unison passages are played precisely, the two musicians allow themselves complete freedom in improvisation. The way they listen to each other, reacting, and either complementing or providing a counterpoint to one another, shows they are on the same wavelength. The piano sounds clear and accurate, delineating pure contours, or at times wallowing in romanticism. The saxophone is spirited, spontaneous, inclined to story-telling, and expressing the personal. We could see their dialogue as a discourse on today’s world, one which flows with vibrant, positive energy.