Iron Wedding no es únicamente el encuentro de dos pianistas excepcionales como son la japonesa Aki Takase y el alemán Alexander Von Schlippenbach. También es la celebración musical de dos compañeros que en lo puramente personal caminan juntos desde hace ya muchos años. Éste es un encuentro fascinante y sorpendente, en el que la música muestra bastante más que lo que se pudiese sospechar a priori. Iron Wedding es un terreno de juego neutral en el que ambos pianistas dejan trabajar con comodidad a su compañero. Como no podría ser de otro modo allí aparecen ecos de muchos músicas y músicos. De Monk y de Fats Waller. De Cecil Taylor, de Ornette Coleman y de Mingus. Pero también de Webern y de Schönberg. Todos ellos cohabitan, coexisten en las manos de estos artistas. La breve duración de las piezas, así como unos diálogos buscados y magníficamente conseguidos, que buscan la belleza, y que no rehuyen sino que por el contrario se empeñan en adentrarse en terrenos aparentemente ajenos al jazz (tal y como ocurre, por ejemplo, en el magnífico final del disco los dos minutos y seis segundos de «Rain», seguidos por los cuatro minutos y once segundos de «Far On»), hacen de Iron Wedding una obra magnífica, así como un magnífico ejemplo de lo que debiera ser el acercamiento y el entendimiento entre dos músicos en un terreno tan aparentemente complicado como es el de los dúos de piano. - Pachi Tapiz / tomajazz
If there was ever anything predictable about these two pianists coming together on record, the results are anything but. Alexander von Schlippenbach is the senior figure by some decades, but this is still such a meeting of minds that the difference of time pales into insignificance. This is their first meeting on record in fifteen years. Time passing has honed their dialectic, rendering it the product of evolving sensibilities.
That's clear enough on the ten minutes of "Suite In Five Parts." The duo seems to dance around each other before settling by mutual and slowly agreed consent on a mood of contemplative unease. Every note is played serving to ensure a state of enticement, to keep the listening closely for things to evolve, even though the prospect of resolution is something perpetually and constructively deferred.
The mood, something antithetical to music that is anything but a music of mood, is on "Twelve Tone Tales" again one of unease, although this time the processes of deep thinking are closer to the music's surface, serving as indicators of dialogue in a perpetual state of flux.
The brief "Eight" gets as close as anything here to Cecil Taylor's hyperactivity, although the contours of the music are inevitably and entirely of the duo's own making. Lennie Tristano comes into the reckoning too with the deployment of long lines strung out for the soundest and most trenchantly resounding of musical reasons.
Neither player is credited with the celeste, but it's that instrument that turns up beneath one pair of hands on "Zankapfel." It adds a whole different color to proceedings which have even less truck with resolution. The music seems to take on an unassuming force of its own, turning the two players into mere servants even while they consciously avoid both bombast and every empty gesture that goes with it.
The title track is almost a repeat performance in terms of the dynamics of the music, but of course the very notion of repetition to musicians like these, is another take on anathema. Even in such circumstances the music is again given the time to breathe and the exchanges between the two are seamless.
"Passacaglia 1, 2, 3" is perhaps as close to conventional in its development as anything here. Underplaying is the mutually agreed order of the day and the slightly faltering progress of the music sounds as much like a homage to Claude Debussy as it does to Thelonious Monk. - Nic Jones
Tracks
01. Early Light
02. Circuit
03. Suite In Five Parts
04. Steinblock
05. Twelve Tone Tales
06. RTP
07. Gold Inside
08. Eight
09. Zankapfel
10. Thown In
11. Off Hand
12. Dwarn's Late Light
13. Iron Wedding
14. Passacaglia 1, 2, 3
15. Yui's Dance
16. Rain
17. Far On
AKI TAKASE piano
ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH piano
All music composed by Aki Takase and Alexander von Schlippenbach
Recorded March 19-20, 2008 at Kulturradio Berlin Brandenburg
Intakt Records – Intakt CD 160 (Switzerland)