Silje Nergaard and Espen Berg @ Pizza Express, Soho – Feb. 16

Silje Nergaard (vocals, toy glockenspiel, cassette player); Espen Berg (piano)

Back in 1990, when I was investigating clocked cars and counterfeit cassettes in the wild streets of Darlington, I would often drive around listening to a tape of Silje Nergaard’s first album. Back then she was on the cusp of chart stardom and she had, I thought, all she needed for chart success,  namely breezy tunes (Tell Me Where You’re Going with Pat Metheny on guitar), lovely hair and a fondness for lying down to sing in her video.  Thirty five years later, she stands up to sing and the hair is shorter, however if you wanted an engrossing, enjoyable, but still relaxed, evening with musicianship of the highest order then the Pizza Express in Soho was the place to be last week.

They began with four songs from Nergaard’s 2021 Covid lockdown album, Houses, a collection of vignettes; life as she saw it looking in windows in her neighbourhood as she walked around. Her own Crowded House was also subjected to scrutiny. The opener, Rain Roofs, is enhanced by Berg plucking piano strings behind a simple melody sung in an ethereal floating voice. Window Bird is from that point where country, folk and jazz meet, Berg plays continuous waves and is always half a beat behind the melody, following Nergaard wherever she is going. The roots of My Crowded House lie in late ‘60s soul; “So many loves in houses side by side” she sings, dreaming of escape. Berg plays tumbling melodies over a thundering left hand. We were sat near Berg’s right hand; “It’s quite a privilege to sit this close to someone this good,” said Steve.

In a case of nominative determinism Ballet Boy draws a picture of a neighbour and his partner locked out of their dancing careers by Covid. It is a tune for the ballet with Nergaard riding a long melodic ‘daaaaance’ at the end of the line ‘His days are a dance’ whilst Bergen injects both tragedy and hope into his playing.

         The mood is lightened with a story of a melody stolen from a coconut seller on an Italian Beach. She had recorded his voice and played it on her phone whilst Berg started to build a swinging melody with a bit of a gentle samba shuffle sounding like it came from the next beach along after Ipanema. Berg starts the next song, Take a Long, Long Walk on a Short, Short Pier, beating the strings, developing a Billie Jean-type rhythm. It’s a song of a broken heart, while he’s walking the pier, she’s heading out. Berg stands to solo on keys and beaten strings, the melody increasing in complexity until Berg has to abandon it with a laugh and launch into something else.

For those of us hoping for something suggestive of his solo piano albums, Berg gives us a long piece that showed all the flowing lyricism of those concerts. The rhythmic lines from the centre of the keys gives an ethereal lightness before he floats seamlessly into Be Still My Heart. It’s a beautiful, delicate ballad from 2001 when she and lyricist, Mike McGurk, were trying to write a modern standards songbook. There is the same delicacy to the lullaby that follows. She reaches into the higher register, pausing to accompany the piano with a few notes on a toy glockenspiel.

She introduces the nearly hit, Tell Me…. by playing the introduction from a demo of the song on a cassette she found in the attic. Berg picks up the melody. Nergaard’s voice still soars after all these years and it carries the same optimistic escapism as it ever did; Berg plays a funky middle section. It’s the same tune, but not as we know it.

The encore is the sombre Japanese Blue, the title track from a 2020 album by these two. Another floating melody carried without words, a moment of hush and it's home time. Dave Sayer