Arresting and highly original ECM solo debut for New York-based singer Judith Berkson, in a programme that features her own idiosyncratic songs and instrumentals, plus jazz standards (Cole Porter’s “All Of You”, George & Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”), “Der Leiermann” from Schuberts “Winterreise”, Jewish cantorial music, and Yiddish folk song.
Oylam
Judith Berkson
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02:52 - 2Brute
05:33 - 3Inside Good Times
02:35 - 4Clives
02:31 - 5All Of You
04:43 - 6Mi Re Do
03:42 - 7Ahavas Oylam
03:36 - 8Little Arrows
02:24 - 9Der Leiermann
03:38 - 10Fallen Innocent Wandering Thieves
02:20 - 11They Can't Take That Away From Me
03:33 - 12Burnt
03:00 - 13Hulyet, Hulyet
04:10 - 14Goodbye Friend No. 2
03:49
It is Berkson’s commitment that makes this ostensibly divergent programme into one music: in many ways the repertoire reflects Judith’s history. As well as being a singer of experimental music, she is also rooted in traditions. A cantor and teacher of liturgical music at Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation in New York, she counts cantorial music and Hebrew liturgy amongst her earliest inspirations. “My father taught me how to sing the prayers, the chanting and the glossing, and I liked that immediately.” From the age of five she studied classical piano, and as a teenager was drawn to the experimental composers, “the atonalists, the avant-gardists, the people working with extended technique. I liked the challenge of that”, while simultaneously working at her studies of art songs from Schubert to Brahms to Schoenberg. At the New England Conservatory she studied voice with Lucy Shelton, theory and composition with Joe Maneri, and piano with Judith Godfrey and Viola Haas. All of these experiences have contribute to the music Berkson makes today.
After singing and playing in jazz and experimental bands and rock groups, including several of her own ensembles, Judith has refocused her energies in solo performance, looking anew at the possibilities for voice with piano accompaniment. “I’ve worked with some very talented players in bands – bands in which I was the singer – and still found it hard to convey the specific qualities I wanted to hear in my songs. Round about 2003 it gradually began to dawn on me that I should be my own accompanist. I’ve been trying to redefine, for myself, what that might mean, exploring new ways in which voice and piano can be combined and performed by one person, working on all the different possibilities of rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and so on. As I did this I was also asking myself some key questions: what is my style? What am I trying to express in music? What do I want to emphasize? I practised very rigorously, wrote new music only for voice and piano, and came out of this period feeling stronger and more self-confident than I had previously. I also discovered that there were ways to integrate aspects of all the music that is important to me in the solo work.”
Her debut solo album “Lu-Lu” was released by Peacock Records in 2008 and praised by publications including the New York Times: “Ms. Berkson sings at an eccentric, stop-and-start, hide-and-seek rubato crawl, sometimes pushing her mezzo-soprano into microtone dissonance against the warm, slow sounds she makes on the piano and Wurlitzer keyboard. Her style isn’t enervated or forced... She’s creating an atmosphere, one long reverie, and she stamps her own disposition on the broad range of songs she chooses to cover.”
In her self-composed pieces on “Oylam”, the words often spill out of the tightly-coiled rhythms in streams-of-consciousness: sometimes the images that words and music together imply reveal new things to their author. Such was the case with “Clives”, affectionately dedicated to Claude Debussy and Charles Ives. “It really reminded me of both of them”.
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