Patricia Barber

Award-winning pianist, vocalist, and composer Patricia Barber stands out through her singular approach and singular timbre. Her inventive keyboard work and delivery occupy an elusive space that draws from post-bop, pop, classical sources, cabaret, and the avant-garde, all delivered in the studio and on stage with a smoky, dreamy yet commanding and changeable aura. Because she composes nearly everything herself and selectively reworks pop material to fit her vision, she resists easy classification; her refusal to engage in standard industry promotion has allowed reviewers to judge each project strictly on its merits. A dedicated road performer, she has maintained a long-running weekly residency at Chicago’s Green Mill while also circling the globe.

Her first recordings, A Distortion of Love and Café Blue, found early favor in Europe before reaching American college audiences in the 1990s and entering the jazz charts. Between 2000 and 2008 on Blue Note she produced strikingly varied albums, among them Verse, which merged jazz with literary texts and earned her a Guggenheim fellowship for its distinctive yet accessible blend. Mythologies, a song cycle drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, expanded her following by both honoring and subverting the art-song tradition. In phrasing and elastic sense of time she evokes Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell more readily than earlier vocal-jazz models.

The daughter of Floyd “Shim” Barber and a blues singer, she initially dismissed the notion of a jazz career, yet after college she felt compelled toward performance. Returning to Chicago, she faced harsh local notices until a steady engagement at the Gold Star Sardine Bar and the self-released 1989 album Split on her own Floyd imprint began to shift opinion. A 1992 Verve contract yielded A Distortion of Love, which brought wider critical notice and a national audience, though major-label constraints prompted her to seek greater artistic autonomy. Café Blue (1994) and Modern Cool (1998) therefore appeared on the small Chicago imprint Premonition.

When Blue Note acquired Premonition in 1998, the larger company supplied marketing support that amplified her existing international profile. Companion, recorded live at the Green Mill in 1999, served as an introduction to new listeners by revisiting familiar repertoire. Night Club (2000) returned her to the studio while preserving the inventive readings that had already marked her work. Verse arrived on Blue Note in 2002; the following March she received the Guggenheim to develop the Ovid-based cycle. Live: A Fortnight in Paris, issued in 2004, contained five originals, five covers, and two new pieces. Mythologies followed in 2006, and the anthology The Premonition Years: 1992–2002 appeared in 2007. In 2008 she recorded the standards album The Cole Porter Mix, then toured festivals and resumed her Monday-night Green Mill slot while testing fresh material with a rotating group of younger Chicago musicians.

She moved to Concord in 2012; Smash was released in January 2013. Subsequent quartet tours took her through Europe, the United States, and Asia before she resumed the Green Mill residency and began composing another art-song cycle. In 2015 she toured “Angels, Birds, and I” with Renée Fleming; the following year the piece opened the Ear Taxi New Music Festival at Chicago’s Harris Theater. An ArtistShare campaign funded the recording project in 2018, and the completed cycle—juxtaposed with distinctive arrangements of Great American Songbook material—was issued as Higher in spring 2019.