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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
