The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
Adult  |  Moonsigns  |  Band Guide  |  Blogs  |  In Pictures
 
CD Reviews  |  Classical  |  Live Reviews  |  Music Features

Patricia Barber

Mythologies | Blue Note
By JON GARELICK  |  September 11, 2006
3.5 3.5 Stars

Brainy, cool Chicago jazz pianist/singer/songwriter Barber won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this song cycle based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses — the first ever awarded to a songwriter. But you have to wonder whether the literary allusion isn’t what Hitchcock would have called a MacGuffin — the “thing the spies are after and the audience doesn’t care.” Whatever Barber’s after, she’s written some of her best songs. Is “Moon” about the gods or a lover’s fantasy of empowerment? Is “Hunger” about Narcissus, eating disorders, or the social condition (“In Scythia, where the pickings are slim/I’m gorgeous and grateful it’s ‘in’ to be thin”)? And “Whiteworld” gives us Oedipus, but in contemporary guise (“To name is to own/to market is to steal/I’m a gangster in a Hummer/& this culture will yield to me”). Lover’s laments like “Morpheus” and “Pygmalion” could become ballad standards as other players discover their inner harmonies, the sturdiness of their structures, the poetry of their lyrics. Jazz, pop, and rock mingle and overlap. (“Icarus” is dedicated to Nina Simone, but its jingly-jangly 12-string says Joni Mitchell.) As if that weren’t enough, Barber brings in rappers to rhyme endangered species (“Phaeton”) and takes the opening spooky dissonant repeated piano arpeggios of “The Hours” into Neal Alger’s blues guitar solo and out with a gospel chorus.

PATRICIA BARBER QUARTET | Scullers, DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel, 400 Soldiers Field Road, Boston | September 21–22 | 617.542.4111

Related: Allison Moorer, At home with home, Seven Sirens, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Nina Simone,  More more >
  • Share:
  • Share this entry with Facebook
  • Share this entry with Digg
  • Share this entry with Delicious
  • RSS feed
  • Email this article to a friend
  • Print this article
Comments

[ 12/06 ]   New England Conservatory Opera  @ Cutler Majestic Theatre
[ 12/06 ]   "El Barrio Brunch"  @ Good Life
ARTICLES BY JON GARELICK
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   GETTING THE STORY  |  December 01, 2009
    Full-length written histories of jazz can be a slog. Especially since "the story of jazz" (as critic Marshall Stearns titled his 1956 tome) only gets longer and more complicated. Personally, on these prose-narrative trips along the New Orleans–New York axis of musical development, I usually bog down somewhere outside Chicago.
  •   MISS TESS | DARLING, OH DARLING  |  December 02, 2009
    Boston singer-songwriter Miss Tess has always had the pipes and the taste to carry off her various ventures into country, blues, and multi-hued swing, but Darling, Oh Darling underlines her overall sound.
  •   ERIK DEUTSCH | HUSH MONEY  |  November 25, 2009
    Having played in projects from jam bands to jazz and as a singer-songwriter accompanist, keyboardist Erik Deutsch led an acoustic jazz album for his debut.
  •   MIXED MEDIA  |  November 18, 2009
    Film noir has been a running theme in composer/pianist Ran Blake's work since the beginning of his career — his very first album, The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), with singer Jeanne Lee, began with David Raskin's theme to Otto Preminger's Laura .
  •   LIVE AND ON RECORD  |  November 04, 2009
    To call Darius Jones’s music avant-garde seems almost beside the point. In its way, it’s older than old — it’s ancient.

 See all articles by: JON GARELICK

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2009 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group