Mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer, and improviser Judith Berkson returns to ECM with a striking new album, Thee They Thy, a work that continues and expands her long-standing exploration of voice, structure, and creative freedom. Berkson describes the recording as a natural extension of her solo practice—intimate songs shaped by jazz sensibilities, moments of improvisation, and influences drawn from song traditions, avant-garde composition, minimalism, and conceptual art. The result is music that resists easy categorization while remaining deeply personal and emotionally direct.
Her 2010 release Oylam first introduced listeners to Berkson’s development of a self-devised vocal language and a highly individual approach to piano accompaniment, an artistic foundation she spent years refining. With Thee They Thy, she moves those ideas into a trio setting, embracing the classic piano-bass-drums format while reshaping it through her own aesthetic lens. She is joined by drummer Gerald Cleaver, a longtime collaborator whose responsiveness and subtle power are central to the album’s fluidity, and bassist Trevor Dunn, making his first appearance on ECM, whose openness to stylistic crosscurrents aligns closely with Berkson’s own approach.
Across ten pieces, the album moves between through-composed material, improvisation, and hybrid forms that blur the line between structure and spontaneity. Tracks such as “Slow,” “Dust,” and “Sated” are carefully constructed songs in which spare melodic ideas carry significant harmonic weight, often drawing on 19th-century harmonic language refracted through modern jazz thinking. Elsewhere, pieces emerge in real time: “Slowly Walk Into It” unfolds as spontaneous composition, where words and music appear together in a stream-of-consciousness flow that embraces vulnerability and risk.
Improvisation plays a central role throughout. In “Torque,” Berkson uses 12-tone ideas as a point of departure, recontextualizing fragments of musical language with a sense of curiosity rather than strict adherence. The title track, “Thee They Thy,” becomes a kind of vocal experiment—part scat, part conceptual play—where atonality and jazz gesture meet in shifting, dreamlike motion. Even within this experimentation, a quiet minimalist sensibility holds the music together, allowing contrasting ideas to coexist without fragmentation.
Midway through the album, Cleaver contributes a solo drum piece, “Cleav,” offering a textured and intimate exploration of rhythm and resonance. His playing reflects both restraint and depth, shaping sound as much through space as through articulation. Meanwhile, “Notice” builds gradually from a repeated vocal phrase into a fuller trio eruption, while “Amerika” gives all three musicians room to expand, with Dunn delivering a particularly expressive bass statement.
A key emotional center of the album lies in Berkson’s engagement with cantorial music. Her performance on “V’shamru” carries a powerful spiritual intensity, continuing a line of work that previously moved listeners on her ECM release Ahavas Oylam. Here, sacred tradition sits alongside experimental form without contradiction, reflecting Berkson’s belief in coexistence rather than separation. Cleaver and Dunn respond with sensitivity, shaping a sound world that is both grounded and elevated.
Berkson’s broader artistic practice spans opera, electroacoustic composition, film scoring, and liturgical music. She studied voice with Lucy Shelton and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory, and has created works for film and stage, including the award-winning Christopher at Sea and the chamber opera Partial Memories. In addition to her compositional work, she serves as a cantor and has collaborated widely across experimental, jazz, and Jewish musical traditions.
Cleaver’s ECM history includes work with Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory and collaborations with artists such as Craig Taborn and Tomasz Stańko, while Dunn’s wide-ranging career includes projects with Mr. Bungle and John Zorn, as well as his own Trio-Convulsant. Together, the trio forms a flexible and deeply responsive ensemble capable of navigating structure, improvisation, and conceptual invention in real time.
Recorded in July 2021 at Oktaven Audio Studio in Mount Vernon, New York, Thee They Thy was produced by Manfred Eicher and continues ECM’s long tradition of documenting boundary-pushing, genre-defying musical conversations.
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