Brigitte Beraha’s Lucid Dreamers took the audience of Green Note to a vivid world of imagination with a myriad of evocative musical shapes and colours. It was a dreamland that lives up to their name.
Beraha’s compositions are heavily charged with emotion that can only come from a life of experience. Steeped with imagery, each tune brings variation but has its own clear identity. They are often pensive and sometimes sound nonsensical, surely meant to take us to those deep, dark hours of the night, but there is also a playful twist of wit about them, like a private wink shared between performer and listener.
The ensemble floats fluidly through scattered sections with incomprehensible broken vocal phrases towards big electronic moments with delay and reverb as we move through dark chasms, light clouds, strange half-forgotten memories – all those places we like to save for the dead of night.
Alcyona Mick’s piano lines meander like leaves fluttering in the wind. She plays so freely with full awareness of the songs but that doesn’t seem to restrict her improvisation. Her piano intertwines beautifully with Beraha’s delicate, dancing melodies and smooth vocal tone.
George Crowley juggles tenor saxophone, bass clarinet and electronics with a tenderness that honours the music. This said, when the time comes for a skanky sax moment, Crowley does not disappoint. On this occasion, Crowley also controlled some electronic effects on Beraha’s vocals, making for some craning of necks to see where that sound was coming from.
Tim Giles’s drumming is like having the perfect amount of salt, which is minimal but just enough to bring out the flavours put forward from the rest of the band. No one was left lamenting the lack of bass in the somewhat unconventional quartet.
A stand-out tune was “What Does It Mean?” It was perhaps the most simple song with a fairly standard form and a very singable melody. But the words, though straightforward in their presentation, question the very meaning of everything. This was placed last in the set and seemed to me like a big question mark at the end.
