Aki Takase (高瀬アキ) was born in Osaka on 26 January 1948 and raised in Tokyo. She had her first piano lesson at three and trained classically at the Toho Gakuen School of Music. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus pulled her toward improvisation, and she has been working professionally since 1971, leading her own groups by her mid-twenties.

Her Japanese period is short but real. The Aki Takase Trio's Aki appeared in 1978, the same year she first travelled to the United States, and As Time Goes By (時のすぎゆくまま) followed in 1979 as her first record under her own name. Minerva's Owl came in 1981, Perdido and ABC in 1982, along with Esprit, a duo with the bassist Yoshio Ikeda, in whose quintet she had recorded in 1978. In 1984 she took a share of Twilight Monologues, a split album with Masahiko Satoh, Ichiko Hashimoto and Takashi Kako, four pianists each contributing their own pieces; hers is "Tori." She also appears on Japanese records of the period by Hiro Tsunoda, Seiichi Nakamura and Hidefumi Toki.

In November 1981 she played her first European concert, at the Berlin Jazz Festival. Enja released the recording in 1982 as Song For Hope, and that album is the reason most listeners outside Japan will meet her: BBE put the title track on J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz from Japan on 26 February 2021 and reissued the whole record in the J Jazz Masterclass series on 5 April 2024. She had also appeared on Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz 8 - Japan: Part Two in 2018.

She has lived in Berlin since 1988, and effectively her whole catalogue since then has been made in Europe. That is why she has been largely absent from the crate-digging account of Japanese jazz: she left before the era that was later dug up, so there was no shelf of unheard Japanese-label records waiting to be found. What there was instead is a continuously working musician, now nearly four decades into a European career.

In Berlin she married the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, one of the founders of European free jazz, and the two of them have documented the marriage in piano duets across three decades: Piano Duets, Live In Berlin 93/94 (1995), Iron Wedding (Intakt, 2008), So Long, Eric! Homage to Eric Dolphy (2014), Live At Café Amores (2018) and Four Hands Piano Pieces (2023). She plays in his Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra and appears on his Monk's Casino, his complete-works Monk project; in 2020 he released Slow Pieces For Aki on Intakt, a record of pieces written for her.

Most of the rest of the catalogue is duos. David Murray on Blue Monk (1993), Valencia (2002) and Cherry Sakura (2017). Rudi Mahall on five records from Duet for Eric Dolphy (1997) through The Dessert (2003), Evergreen (2009) and Fifty Fifty (2019) to Neverblue (2026). Han Bennink on Two For Two (2011), Louis Sclavis on Yokohama (2009), Ingrid Laubrock on Kasumi (2019), Silke Eberhard on the Ornette Coleman Anthology (2007), Lauren Newton, Konrad Bauer, Maria João, Nobuyoshi Ino, the violinist Ayumi Paul on Hotel Zauberberg (2015), and Daniel Erdmann on Isn't It Romantic? (2021) and Ellington (2024).

Running alongside the duos is a body of project records, each taking a single composer apart: W.C. Handy on St. Louis Blues (2001), Fats Waller on Plays "Fats" Waller (Enja, 2003), which won the German Record Critics' Prize of the Year in 2004, Ornette Coleman in 2007, Duke Ellington on My Ellington (2013) and again with Erdmann in 2024, Eric Dolphy on So Long, Eric! (2014), and Bizet on Carmen Rhapsody (2023). The Waller project has outlasted all of them, running from the 2003 studio record through Plays Fats Waller in Berlin (2013) to a 2009 Babylon Berlin concert released in 2019 with Eugene Chadbourne on banjo, guitar and vocals, Nils Wogram on trombone, Rudi Mahall on bass clarinet and Paul Lovens on drums.

She works outside music as well. Diagonal (2002) is a collaboration with the writer Yoko Tawada, issued by the book publisher Konkursbuch Verlag rather than a record label, and Hokusai - Piano Solo (2019) takes the printmaker as its subject.

In 2021 the Deutsche Jazzunion gave her the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize, Germany's most prestigious jazz award, presented on 5 November at Jazzfest Berlin. The same year she won the Deutscher Jazzpreis for piano and keyboards. She has taken the German Record Critics' Award nine times between 1988 and 2017. She is still recording: Ellington and the Japanic record Forte both appeared in 2024, Tanto in 2025, and Neverblue is her 2026 record.

The classical training at Toho Gakuen is audible in the touch and the voicings, and so is what came after it: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, the three names she credits with turning her toward improvisation.

Her working method is repertoire. Rather than writing a book of originals and touring it, she picks a composer and dismantles them, and the results are neither transcription nor free playing but something between. The Waller records are the clearest case. His tunes are played straight long enough to be recognised and then taken somewhere else entirely, which is closer to what Waller himself did with popular song than a careful reproduction would be.

The other constant is the duo. She has recorded with bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, trombone, violin, voice, turntables and a second piano, and the format suits her because it leaves the piano exposed. Nothing in a Takase duo is padding.