DAILY TELEGRAPH: Best of 2013 in Jazz - AKI TAKASE'S 'MY ELLINGTON'

By Ivan Hewett, Music Critic

DAILY TELEGRAPH

Jazz expert Ivan Hewett picks his best album of the year:

• Aki Takase: My Ellington (Intakt Records)

 Pianist Aki Takase’s hommage to Duke Ellington shows the profound insight that only love nurtured over decades can bring. Sometimes she makes Ellington’s original emerge miraculously from angular abstraction. Sometimes she gives us his music ‘neat’, before leading it somewhere new. There are more ideas in a single track than one normally finds in an entire album. So choosing a download track is difficult, but A Little Max (Parfait) captures Takase’s wit and power to move, on the tiniest scale. 

Here is the link to IVAN HEWETT'S TOP TEN 2013 in Jazz:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/10506104/Top-10-Jazz-albums-of-2013.html

THE GUARDIAN - review: Schweizer & Favre: Live in Zürich

Irène Schweizer & Pierre Favre: Live in Zurich – review

(Intakt Records)

• 
• • John Fordham
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 12 December 2013 23.30 GMT
  • 
    

Joyous openness … Irène Schweizer and Pierre Favre. Photograph: Francesca Pfeffer

1. 
2. Schweizer Favre
3. Live In Zürich
4. Intakt
5. 2013

Pianist Irène Schweizer and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Pierre Favre have travelled many roads over long careers in the outlands where high-level virtuosity and tireless improvisational urges meet. They first played together 45 years ago and renew an old partnership here on their third duo release for Intakt, the first having arrived in 1990. Even at the farthest improv extremes, the work of both musicians is marked by a pristine clarity, and Schweizer plays a great deal of engaging spontaneous melody, while Favre often affects a kind of louche, lolloping swing. The tracks are short, pithy and varied – from twitchy and eventually headlong pieces such as Black Mirror or the monkish Broken Notes, to the flying Gemini Constellation (where Schweizer sounds like Art Tatum morphing into Cecil Taylor). Slowly undulating sound collages turn dreamily melodic, and then thumpingly swinging, as in Bird of Paradise, while others become rhapsodic, intensifying meditations (Huben wie Druben) or rocking boogies (Night Flight). The two of them sound at the top of their game, and it's music-making of a joyous openness you certainly don't need to be a die-hard to hear.