This month: Brigitte Beraha
The days when the world of the jazz musician was a sealed environment are long gone, if they ever existed. Brigitte Beraha’s discography encompasses solo and ensemble projects alongside groups such as Babelfish and Solstice, the latter having released a new digital album, with a livestream on 13 May. ‘I’d always been passionate about music but jazz wasn’t the first thing I listened to,’ she says. ‘I always was and still am a lover of classical and contemporary music, including musique concrète and electronic music, and for a long time I thought I had to keep it all separate. I’d loved Chopin, Schumann, Bach’s organ music, then I studied contemporary music at Goldsmiths and continued with that.’
So when did jazz make itself known? ‘A friend subjected me to the music of John Coltrane. I resisted it for a while, but one night something clicked. I learned from the bebop scatting of Anita Wardell that you could improvise with your voice in that way, then I discovered people like Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone. I also wanted to sing jazz standards, so I did that and still love doing it, but it’s easy to get pigeonholed. People might say to me, “Oh, you’re a standards singer?” and I’d reply “Yes!”, but I kept finding ways of using my voice and realised that I didn’t have to keep everything compartmentalised.’
All of which brings us to her current work with electronics, exemplified by the group on her album Lucid Dreamers which she hopes will resume gigging in May. ‘A lot of the music I listen to doesn’t really have a place for the voice,’ she adds, ‘so I wondered how I could bring these two things together. I’m very happy to have received a personal development grant from the Arts Council, partly to create a new work, which is to do with conversations between nature and the industrial world; some of it is acoustic, some completely electronic, although my use of electronics is deliberately limited at the moment. I have a looper, a voice transformer, delay and freeze units and other things, all to do with manipulating the voice, so again it’s nature meeting industry. It should be released as an album soon.’ Roger Thomas
‘I realised that I didn’t have to keep everything compartmentalised’