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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.

Brittany Anjou is a pianist, vibraphonist, improviser, vocalist, and composer. She leads four projects in NYC: the L.A.R.C.E.N.Y. Chamber Orchestra, The Brittany Anjou Trio, BI TYRANT, and BEWAA (traditional Ghanaian xylophone ensemble for jazz). She has toured and performed 13 countries in North America, Europe, and Africa. She was inspired early in life by Danilo Perez, Bill Evans, Gene Harris, Wynton Kelly, Oscar Peterson, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu. She is continually inspired by 20th century avant-garde composition, Ghanaian Xylophone, 1950’s film scores, free improvisation, jazz, death metal, experimental, outsider music, trip hop, hip hop, traditional West African drumming, Balinese gamelan, dubstep, jungle, trance, & punk. While living abroad in Prague and Accra, she studied with contemporary composer Milan Slavicky and traditional Ghanaian repertoire with master xylophonist Bernard Woma. She has worked with The Shaggs, The Dot Wiggin Band, Elysian Fields, Hazel-Rah, The Friendly Bears, Monocle, Sondre Lerche, Stick Against Stone Orchestra, Mara Rosenbloom, Eve Ensler, Joseph Keckler, Erin Markey, Karen Mantler, Carol Lipnik, DJ Dhundee, Darius Jones, Jean Carla Rodea, John Loeffler, Maria Neckam, Abby Ahmad, Terry Dame, Jesse Krakow, Adam Minkoff, Ravens and Chimes, and many others.
 
The L.A.R.C.E.N.Y. Chamber Orchestra, founded in 2013, performs MD Brittany Anjou’s compositions and arrangements as well as classic jazz and contemporary music. The LCO is conducted by MSM conductor Brady Hearn. Consisting of heavily active NYC musicians, composers, engineers and producers, their collective musical mission statement is committing L.A.R.C.E.N.Y.: Lethal Activist Revitalization & Creativity Enaction in New York. LCO members have worked with artists such as Karl Berger, the Books, Zammuto, Elysian Fields, Me’Shell N’degeocello, and The Machine.

No one alive today can assay for certain the scope and reach that is Prairie Empire. Arcing across the untrammeled and mysterious blank on the map that is the Great American Desert, from the crumbling wharves of Brooklyn to the misty mountains of Oregon, the only thing that can be said for certain is that Ms. Brittain Ashford stands at its center. But is she its Secret Empress, or merely the inscrutable power behind the throne of its mellifluous and far-flung sonic landscape? Where Ashford came from is an enigma; one day, she simply appeared on the Coney Island Boardwalk, carrying a Gladstone bag packed with a dulcimer and a glockenspiel, and clutching an autoharp to her chest like an orphan, abandoned on some distant doorstep, that she alone can protect and carry into the wide, wicked world.
 
When mistaken for a radical agitator, thanks to her skill at squeezing out sounds on the Marxophone, Ashford decamped to the City of Roses, where nefarious agents of composition and concord were drawn into her orbit. Soon she was seen, late at night, in the Harlowe House Grammophone Recording Emporium, accompanied by noted arranger and international rapscallion Mr. Mark Robertson, who escaped a burning wreck in the Bay of Bengal with nothing but a cello and a bass, which he soon put to work in service of the Empire. Also reported skulking in the shadows were none other than Mr. Andrew Campbell, the Western Wizard of violin and viola, and the perniciously pulse-pounding percussionist Mr. Bob Reynolds: all members of the notorious musical band of brothers known as Harlowe and The Great North Woods. Having narrowly escaped tarring and feathering down in Chico, their fortuitous appearance in the woods of the Northwest Corridor coincided with Ashford’s vast musical conspiracy, traces of which can also be found in the dulcet vocals of such infamous fugitives as Ms. Caitlin Steitzer, Mr. Chris Miller and Ms. Shenandoah Davis. Scholars of the period also detect the distinct signature of Mr. Matt Iverson’s trumpet and, floating like a will o’ the wisp above a bayou, the clarinet of Mr. Cody Caudill.
 
The recorded document that arose from those midsummer nights round the microphone took the dream-life of the nation by storm, its simple title humbly concealing its mad ambition: PRAIRIE EMPIRE. When Ashford next surfaced, it was once again on the streets of Old New York, where now her comrades in concord routinely take to the streets, taverns, and coffee houses, mesmerized dazed citizens with the overpowering beauty and melancholy of the Empire’s songs: Ms. Portia Zwicker wielding the viola, Ms. Layne McNish the cello, Mr. Zach Huckle-Bauer the trumpet, and Mr. Adam Jacobson the devilishly hypnotic drums. Close confederate Ms. Caitlin Steitzer, who alone is rumored to know the whole desperately divine and intoxicating truth about the Empire, is often spotted playing with them as well.
 
They say no blade of grass can rustle, no cicada can pierce the air, without the sanction of Prairie Empire. Only those initiates into its majestic yearning can ever know for sure.