Babelfish, the talented London lineup of singer Brigitte Beraha, pianist Barry Green, bassist Chris Laurence and drummer Paul Clarvis, follow their impressive 2012 debut album with an even more wide-ranging session, in which originals rub shoulders with works by Caetano Veloso, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten and more. There’s an unfussy lightness from the off: Veloso’s Michelangelo Antonioni, sung in Portuguese, is reverberatingly rhapsodic, and Steve Lacy’s Your Turn to Ask is a cool swinger with sparing, Monkish chord-clangs. Green’s wide piano vocabulary, Laurence’s expressiveness with the bow, Clarvis’s dancing brushwork and Beraha’s abstracted vocals form four short solo interludes in the tracklist; and Beraha’s sublimely gliding merger of Copland’s Heart, We Will Forget Him into a wryly shrugging account of the standard song I’m Always Chasing Rainbows is a testament to her sensitivity and vocal class.
