Achim Kaufmann has been active as a pianist and composer since the early 1980s.
The improvising trio Kaufmann/Gratkowski/de Joode, a duo with the Amsterdam-based reed player Michael Moore, and the piano trio grünen (with Christian Lillinger and Robert Landfermann) are among his most enduring projects.
Together with the poet and visual artist Gabriele Guenther, he conceived the multi-disciplinary Trokaan Project which combines aspects of improvised chamber music, poetry and text fragments with electro-acoustic textures.
He regularly performs in duo settings with Ignaz Schick, Yorgos Dimitriadis and Kalle Kalima, SKEIN (with Frank Gratkowski, Wilbert de Joode, Liz Allbee, Richard Barrett, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and Tony Buck), Sestetto Internazionale and M0VE (both with Harri Sjöström), and in a newly founded trio with Nick Dunston and Mariá Portugal.
Further collaborations include Han Bennink, George Lewis, Jim Black, Paul Lovens, Tomász Stanko, Mark Dresser, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Shelley Hirsch, Okkyung Lee, Axel Dörner, Gerry Hemingway, Thomas Lehn, Steve Swallow, Al Foster and many others.
In 2001, Achim received the SWR jazz award and the renowned Albert Mangelsdorff award in 2015.
Since 2018, he has held a professorship for piano and ensemble at the Weimar Conservatory of Music.

“For many years, Achim Kaufmann has been one of the most inspiring and exciting personalities of the European jazz and improvisation scene. His music bears witness to great harmonic subtlety and structural depth. A brilliant pianist and composer, his reflected exploration of tradition has led him to a nuanced, contemporary sound language that encompasses poetry, energy and abstraction in equal measure.”                                                          Julia Neupert, SWR radio