Paolo Tognola and Takenori Saeki met inside the International Collective of free jazz and free improvisation. They are both part of the Unorthodox Musical Behavior project, an Italian-Japanese quartet, with Carlo Cimino and Yuta Star. After the first live collaborations, they decided to record a duo album, but unfortunately the pandemic interrupted their live activity and prevented them from traveling to meet. So, as soon as the borders reopened, they decided to record five sessions in Tokyo that would form the album Ways.
At the heart of their poetics and aesthetics, there is the idea of extemporaneity, of absolute free form and free improvisation. Ways represents five dialogues between two actors, the piano and the percussions. Both the language and the rhythmic melodic ideas are developed «in motu». The radical and nonconformist attitude of the work is the stylistic figure that the duo seeks in every note, just as the abstraction and the dreamlike component represent its expressive character.