Ant Law & Brigitte Beraha

“Ensconced”

(Ubuntu Music UBU0169)

Ant Law – guitars, Brigitte Beraha – voice

with guests;

Petros Klampanis – bass (5)
Ernesto Simpson (drums (5)
Max Luthert – electronics (6)
Jamie Murray – drums (6)
Matt Calvert – electronics, acoustic guitar, piano, dulcitone (6), synths, electronics (7)
Kit Downes – piano (7)
Adam Kovacs – percussion (7)

“Ensconced” is the debut album from the duo of guitarist Ant Law and vocalist Brigitte Beraha, two regular presences on the Jazzmann web pages.

Law has appeared as the leader of his own groups and has delivered an excellent series of albums under his own name.  “Entanglement” (2013), “Zero Sum World” (2015) and “Life I Know” (2018) feature a regular working quintet including Mike Chillingworth (alto sax),  Tom Farmer (double bass), James Maddren (drums) and either John Turville or Ivo Neame (piano). My review of “Life I Know” can be found here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/ant-law-life-i-know

More recently Law has assembled a new quintet that he has named Ant Law’s Unified Theories. Something of a ‘supergroup’ the new band features pianist Gwilym Simcock, saxophonist Will Vinson, bassist Orlando Le Fleming and drummer Ernesto Simpson. The quintet is scheduled to appear at the 2024 EFG London Jazz Festival and is due to release its debut album in 2025.

The 2022 release “Same Moon In The Same World” featured the duo of Law and saxophonist Alex Hitchcock in a series of collaborations with well known US based musicians who recorded their contributions remotely. This ‘lockdown album’ was a recording that I described as “ a highly coherent and convincing piece of work that Law and Hitchcock can be justly proud of”. The full review can be found here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/ant-law-and-alex-hitchcock-same-moon-in-the-same-world

The Same Moon In The Same World project has subsequently toured in the UK and Europe with Law and Hitchcock joined by Danish born bassist Jasper Hoiby and Korean born drummer Sun-Mi Hong.

Together with keyboard player Rich Harrold and drummer Rick Kass Law is a member of Trio HLK, a group that performs Harrold’s often complex compositions, pieces that deconstruct and re-assemble jazz standards, whilst simultaneously drawing on the influence of contemporary classical music. The trio has released two albums to date, “Standard Time” (2018) and the recent “Anthropometricks” (2024). “Anthropometricks” is reviewed here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/trio-hlk-anthropometricks

Others with whom Law has worked include saxophonists Emma Rawicz,  Tim Garland, Paul Riley and Alam Nathoo, trumpeter Henry Spencer, pianist Scott Flanigan,  bassists Matt Ridley and Ferg Ireland and drummers Ollie Howell and Marc Michel. He has also collaborated with the band Partikel, led by saxophonist and composer Duncan Eagles.

 Law is also published author, having written a book on the subject of the “Perfect Fourths” system of guitar tuning titled “Third Millennium Guitar; An Introduction”.

Born in Milan to British/Turkish parents vocalist and lyricist Brigitte Beraha was subsequently brought up in Monaco. She moved to London in 1996 to study music at Goldsmiths College before moving on to the Guildhall School of Music. Now settled in the English capital her international upbringing has contributed to an ability to sing convincingly in a variety of different languages.

She first came to my attention with the release of her second solo album “Flying Dreams” back in 2008.  This was an album of quietly lyrical, but subtly adventurous, original material. Her début, the standards based “Prelude to a Kiss” had first appeared in 2005.

Beraha’s most recent solo release is “By The Cobbled Path” (2021), a true solo album that features original songs written during lockdown. In addition to singing Beraha also plays piano and continues the experiments with electronics that began with her band Lucid Dreamers, an ensemble featuring saxophonist George Crowley, drummer Tim Giles and now pianist Alcyona Mick. The albums “Lucid Dreamers” (2020) and “Blink” (2022) are reviewed elsewhere on this site, as is a live performance by the Lucid Dreamers quartet at The Hive, Shrewsbury in September 2022.

Beraha has recorded previous duo albums with pianists John Turville (“Red Skies”, 2012) and Frank Harrison (“The Way Home”, 2018). In 2018 she also made a substantial guest contribution to the album “Criss Cross”,  a duo recording by pianist Alcyona Mick and saxophonist Tori Freestone. 

She is a key member of the co-operative ensembles Babelfish and Solstice and also of Riff Raff, the sextet led by bassist and composer Dave Manington.  Beraha has also been an important member of the Loop and E17 musicians’ collectives and is generally a busy and creative presence on the UK jazz scene. 

A prolific collaborator she has featured as a very welcome guest on recordings by pianists Ivo Neame and Geoff Eales, trumpeters Andre Canniere, Andy Hague and Reuben Fowler and saxophonists Ed Jones, Issie Barratt and Kevin Figes among others.

As well as being an enterprising and versatile vocalist Beraha is also an accomplished song writer and lyricist who has had a considerable creative input into all the recordings with which she has been involved, often adding her lyrics to the music of others.

Beraha was one of the many artists that Law collaborated with during lockdown as part of his QZ (Quarantine Zone) project, which also provided the initial source of the “Same Moon In The Same World” album.

Talking about their duo collaboration Law And Beraha say;
“‘Ensconced’ has a cosy, autumnal feeling. It is focused on the sound of Brigitte’s voice and Ant playing steel-string acoustic guitar. On recent projects Brigitte has experimented with electronics and effects - but here we hear her directly, sat around the campfire…”

This certainly applies to the first four tracks, but the electronic side of things is not entirely forgotten as the duo subsequently invite a cast of illustrious guests to join them, including electronic artists Max Luthert and Matt Calvert.

“The duo continue;
We invite you in with the sweet ‘A Kiss To Build A Dream On’, followed by five new original songs and one reinterpretation of an earlier composition, ‘Harvest’, in which Brigitte sings wordlessly. The album gathers velocity as it progresses and there are guest appearances from Kit Downes, Petros Klampanis, Matt Calvert, and more. It closes with Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’ - once again performed as a duo, just as the album opened.”

As promised the opening “A Kiss To Build A Dream On” is an intimate duo performance with Beraha’s wistful, sometimes semi-spoken vocals complemented by Law’s acoustic guitar. This is a song that was famously recorded by Louis Armstrong, but with this sparse, folk style interpretation Law and Beraha very much make it their own.

“Ensconced (By My Side)”, effectively the title track, maintains the intimate ‘campfire’ ambience, but pushes the envelope a little further with its elongated vocal lines and ambiguous lyrics. Again there’s a yearning quality about Beraha’s vocal delivery. The original songs are jointly credited to Law and Beraha, but I suspect that the in the main that the melodies are his and the lyrics hers, especially in view of Law commenting
“It’s incredibly rare for me to play the acoustic steel-strung guitar, but that instrument is at the centre, alongside Brigitte’s voice. It’s also unusual for me to collaborate with vocalists/lyricists and I am amazed at the depth and colour Brigitte’s poetry brings to this music.”

The tantalisingly brief “Clever Hans” pushes the music even further into folk song territory and is apparently the tale of a gifted horse.

The final item in the opening batch of guitar and voice songs is “From A to Z”, which sees Law moving to electric guitar and deploying effects for the first time. Nevertheless the mood remains intimate and confessional.

“Harvest” sees the duo joined by their first guests, bassist Petros Klampanis and drummer Ernesto Simpson. Written 2020 the piece includes Beraha’s wordless vocal melodies and features Klampanis as a double bass soloist. Law, again playing electric guitar, is featured as an instrumental soloist for the first time, while Simpson is a busy and colourful presence behind the drum kit.

“Above Water” introduces further guests, with drummer Jamie Murray and saxophonist Duncan Eagles augmented by the electronic contributions of Max Luthert and Matt Calvert, the latter also adding acoustic guitar, piano and dulcitone. All of the guests make significant contributions and the music is further enhanced by Beraha’s singing of her own lyrics.

Calvert also sprinkles more electronic fairy dust on “Who We Are”, which flirts with trip hop and includes further guest contributions from percussionist Adam Kovacs and pianist Kit Downes. It’s Downes that threatens to steal the show with a lyrical piano solo, but the piece is also notable for a wonderful vocal performance from Beraha, who delivers an evocative and thoughtful lyric with the appropriate skill and gravitas. Her words combine wistful childhood memories of growing up in the South of France with broader reflections on mortality and the passage of time. The mix of acoustic and electronic sounds works perfectly, making this one of the album’s stand out tracks.

Following three cuts that have expanded the sonic palette the duo go back to basics for the closing track and album’s second standard, the Leonard Bernstein song “Some Other Time”. Once again it’s a delightfully intimate duo performance with Law playing his steel stringed acoustic and Beraha delivering a beautiful and expressive vocal performance that fully captures the bitter-sweet melancholy of the lyrics, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

“Ensconced” is an album that sees its principal protagonists exploring new musical territory, whilst also maintaining links to their previous individual projects. Law’s playing of steel stringed acoustic on half of the tracks represents something of a new departure for him, as does working with vocals and lyrics. The album represents less of a radical change for Beraha, although this is the first time that she has worked so closely with a guitarist, her two previous duo recordings having been made with pianists.

The track “Harvest” provides a link to Law’s musical past, whilst the use of electronics on both “Above Water” and “Who We Are” references Beraha’s own experiments as a solo artist and with Lucid Dreamers.

The album is well structured with a strong sense of narrative, but at a little over thirty three minutes in length it’s rather short by modern CD standards. It represents a very impressive debut and is a success on its own terms, but one senses that there is still much more to come from this talented duo.

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