Judith Berkson Trio

Judith Berkson was raised and long worked in an ancient musical tradition, but she has enthusiastically put that past into music bound for the future, music that reconsiders what it means to be a jazz singer. Berkson’s father was a cantor in a Chicago synagogue; he began strictly teaching his daughter that repertoire when she was three, and she sang in a group with her family. Berkson’s ingrained affinity for singing eventually led her to study voice and composition at the New England Conservatory. In New York, she simultaneously navigated multiple lanes—performing with cutting-edge classical ensembles, entering the city’s teeming jazz scene, singing and teaching in a synagogue, composing an opera about the Jewish liturgy. For her 2010 solo ECM debut, Berkson combined Yiddish texts and Gershwin songs, her own compositions and Schubert arrangements. Indeed, Schubert and Schumann lieder were at the heart of Liederkreis, a two-volume set of aggressively experimental electronic arrangements of their work.

All of these lanes converge, at last, on Thee They Thy, Berkson’s second album for ECM and first with the trio of bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Gerald Cleaver. She turns the Jewish prayer “V’shamru” into a yearning plea, her voice vibrating as the rhythm section broods beneath her. On “Notice,” she sings the sentence “I notice” like a Descartes acknowledgement of existence before repeating it until it becomes a pathway to oblivion, as if she’s stupefied by the act of giving away all her attention. A powerhouse pianist, Berkson uses her galloping voice and twisting instrumental lines to explore multiplicity on the title track, Cleaver and Dunn framing the path that she charges down. Berkson brings an uncanny résumé to the world of jazz vocals; the music she makes bears that out in its openness and innovation.