Oylam is the first ECM album by New York singer, keyboard player, composer and cantor Judith Berkson, a solo record on which she accompanies her own voice. Her songs and instrumentals sit beside jazz standards, a Schubert song, Jewish cantorial music and a Yiddish folk song, and the spare, pensive way she performs them holds the programme together. The title, as ECM glosses it, means world, universe, creation or realm.
Berkson learned to sing the prayers from her father and began classical piano at five. At the New England Conservatory she studied voice with Lucy Shelton and theory and composition with Joe Maneri. As a teenager she was already drawn to atonal and avant-garde composers while singing art songs by Schubert, Brahms and Schoenberg. Around 2003 she began accompanying herself, and an earlier solo album, Lu-Lu, appeared in 2008. Oylam was recorded in April 2009 at Artesuono Studio in Udine, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Steve Lake as producer. She plays piano, Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos and Hammond organ.
Two solo piano pieces, Goodbye Friend No. 1 and No. 2, open and close the album. Between them come her own miniatures, such as Clives, which she dedicated to Claude Debussy and Charles Ives. Cole Porter's All of You and the Gershwins' They Can't Take That Away from Me are reworked in ways that keep their charm but stay unpredictable. She sings Der Leiermann, from Winterreise, in her own English lyrics. Ahavas Oylam, built on cantorial material, and Mordekhai Gebirtig's Hulyet, Hulyet show the weight of her chest voice, at times over organ, at times unaccompanied.
In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff heard "standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences", and called her "a calm, curious performer, devising brave ways to accompany herself". Martin Johnson of The Wall Street Journal found her mastery of each idiom more remarkable than the range itself. Writing in PopMatters in 2010, D. M. Edwards praised the two piano pieces for making the most of minimal means, and singled out the Schubert as a high point.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2121, first released in April 2010.
