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Brittany Anjou was born in 1984 in Minot, North Dakota, moving to Seattle as a very young child. Her mother was a pianist, flutist, and music teacher, and Brittany began playing piano herself at age five. Her mother also played a lot of jazz recordings around the house, and at 12, hearing a solo by the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, Brittany was inspired to begin studying jazz.

As a high school student, she joined and toured with Seattle’s Roosevelt High School Jazz Band, meeting and performing with Wynton Marsalis in New York. Attending the Stanford Jazz Workshop at 16, she worked with Clark Terry, who became her idol. It was around that same time that Anjou began composing — including much of the material that eventually became Enamiĝo Reciprokataj

Arriving in New York to study music at NYU, Anjou studied with Stefon Harris, Tony Moreno, and Sherrie Maricle, as well as with Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer at School for Improvised Music. She also studied classical music in Prague with composer Milan Slavický, and West African gyil music in Ghana with master player Bernard Woma and his protegees. She has since performed in 13 countries on three continents with a number of ensembles including the New York Arabic Orchestra, the Shaggs, Bi TYRANT, and the LARCENY Chamber Orchestra (founding and leading the latter two).

Anjou began performing selections from Enamiĝo Reciprokataj while living in Prague in 2005 and continued honing it thereafter, including in a well-received performance with Bi TYRANT at New York’s Zinc Bar during the 2018 Winter Jazz Festival. In the fall of 2018, she returned to Kuwait to teach piano and jazz ensembles as part of a nine-month residency at the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Center opera house, in an experimental music program, the first of its kind in the country.