No drums. No bass player. There’s no need.
Issued on English jazz reeds icon Alan Barnes’ own Woodville label which specialises in highly retro mainstream and straightahead sounds, singer Brigitte Beraha who is very much an outside avant singer instead tapping more on the vintage an inside vein with standards and originals that end up making you listen that bit more closely.
On ‘Tea for Two’ there are so many layers it’s a tapestry – and the embroidery of a pleasurable Barry Green solo easily elicits applause from the tricoteuses present as there’s an audience. There’s no need for the guillotine to chop anything back apart from the Brazilian number that doesn’t quite work.
Green was on Ian Shaw and Tony Kofi’s outstanding An Adventurous Dream last year. He goes way back with Beraha to their Babelfish days.
Barnes plays clarinet extensively on the album recorded at the Vortex in Dalston, east London, in late-2023.
Barnes is great when he comes in on clarinet on Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain’s 1930s song ‘I’ll Be Seeing You Again’ – the audience love that.
But the most stirring thing here and there are plenty of choice bits is the setting of Tennessee Williams’ ‘We Have Not Long To Love’ to Beraha’s own tune. Barnes’ clarinet soloing again is sublime, of Benny Goodman calibre.
We have not long to love.
Tennessee Williams
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Listening to Beraha’s voice I thought of Judy Collins’ a bit on her album Judith singing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You Again’. But it’s not even that close a comparison – Beraha brings a different kind of less folky innocence to the song. I never know quite how to place her sound. Comparisons are invidious. But it doesn’t stop critics making them.
The audience are listening closely chuckling at the part of the treatment of Irving Berlin’s ‘The Best Thing for You’ when Brigitte sings the Call Me Madam song and gets to “I’ve been convinced after thinking it through
That the best thing for you would be me.“
She’s no Ethel Merman. I don’t even mean that as a criticism. More it’s that Beraha doesn’t belt it so loudly that you could hear the song without amplification at the furthest end of Gillett Square. That might have been the case if, stone the crows, Merman was brought back to life and planted on the diminutive Vortex stage.
A lovely memento if you happened to be in the audience that November night but intact enough as an album however brief it is to work in its own right even if you weren’t. The more experimental side of Beraha’s art emerges on her solo scat on ‘Solitude’ and it works well in context accompanied very beautifully by Green. It’s his setting to the words of AA Milne’s – of Winnie the Pooh renown:
I have a house where I go,
AA Milne
Where nobody ever says “No”;
Where no one says anything – so
There is no one but me.
Amen to that sentiment every once in a while when you don’t need an answer and don’t meet a chancer.
Out on Friday 9 May. The album’s first track is streaming.
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