Patricia Barber

In 2011 Patricia Barber has just finished a new 'live' album of the Patricia Barber Quartet recorded ' by Chris Grabowski at the wildly popular Green Mill residency. “Monday Night, vol2” is available through her website: patriciabarber.com She is also putting the finishing touches on other Floyd Records projects, one a DVD entitled Patricia Barber & Kenny Werner— 'Live' in Concert . This chronicles a resplendent evening with Patricia and Kenny and two 9' Steinway pianos at the sold-out 1000 seat Pick- Staiger Auditorium—this DVD will be available in the spring. Patricia is also and mostly busy finishing a set of all original songs for an eagerly awaited album to be called, Synchronicity due out in the fall. These days you wil hear Patricia playing most often with her Quartet, the pbq, with Neal Alger on guitar, Larry Kohut on bass, and Eric Montzka on drums. This Quartet continues to develop new, innovative ways of presenting jazz and remains the crowd favorite. Patricia is also performing concerts with personnel stepping into the Quartet from Paris, NY, Fargo, Brazil and beyond. She is performing with classical musicians, solo, leading a variety of different enesembles and composing commission works for musicals, classical groups, singers, and jazz ensembles. This year's bookings have her all over the world, starting with the historic double-bill with Kenny Werner, followed by a residency at the Jazz Standard in NY and continuing the year in Macedonia, Turkey, San Francisco, South Africa, etc. and of course, France. For most concert artists, this would be a light schedule, and she likes it that way. It leaves her time to read, think, compose, work with her trio and quartet at the legendary Green Mill in Chicago on Monday nights, and live her life in a self-designed art orbit, allowing her to pen some of the most original and lasting music being written anywhere. In 2003, Barber received the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded to a songwriter. The task, to compose a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphosis, resulted in the category-defying Mythologies for jazz quintet, child rappers, gospel choir, and backup singers. Mythologies, promoted with major sponsorship by Blue Note Records, and The Poetry Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, like others of Barber's recording projects and concerts, garnered spectacular reviews while leaving a few dazed and confused. This seems to be Barber's path—to break ground by devoting her life to building repertoire that is by turns smart, funny, sad, trashy, elegant, alternative, contemporary/classical, hip, and cutting-edge, but in the end is truly and deeply jazz.

Barber is a study in contradictions. She is one of the most highly sought-after concert artists in jazz, and one of the most difficult to get. Her music is uniquely hers (and her fans'); she doesn't explain it or herself (most probably the reason she has never been nominated for a Grammy). She doesn't have a TV, she isn't a voting member of NARAS. She is at once a big success and a well-kept secret. She will turn down most offers, choosing instead to study, compose, practice the piano, polish a language, or tend to her family and garden. She is elusive but pulls out all the stops at the few venues where she chooses to perform throughout the year. She regularly sells out concerts in European Capitals from Lisbon to Moscow. Paris is her musical second home. Barber's early days were spent playing at Chicago's legendary Gold Star Sardine Bar. As early as 1994, Bill Zehme of Esquire Magazine wrote "Patricia Barber makes jazz the way Tiffany makes crystal — sleek and smart and dazzling. You must hush the world when she plays and listen to that which no one ever thought to do before with notes, with voice, with style penultimate. She is, for my money, the best jazz performer currently working the planet." At one moment her voice is ploughing dusky low registers, at another careening the upper stratospheres; it has drawn comparison to “chilled bourbon,” and been called “a pure dark whisper straight up from the soul.” She has long since evolved from the fine-tuned nightclub artist of the Gold Star Sardine Bar into a sinewy, risk-taking vocalist and “top-flight pianist” (the Chicago Tribune). Barber did not start writing her own songs with lyrics until the early 1990s, and continues to perform them alongside jazz standards, vocal and purely instrumental, and occasional jazzed up pop covers. Today she is recognized as one of the foremost songwriters of our time, compared more than once by the LATimes with Joni Mitchell and Peggy Lee. In 2001 Margo Jefferson of the New York Times announced: "This is what Patricia Barber has: adventurous piano playing, a low-vibrato alto on perpetual rhythm and timbre alert and smart songs about the way we think and live, not just the way we love… This is the kind of art we need to be on the lookout for everywhere. The 21st century has started. We can't afford to be left behind." Barber has an uncanny knack for embedding complexly layered music and verse in classic Barber-tweaked song forms marked by exquisite elegance, strange commentary, and brilliant, funny surprises. Elsewhere the NY Times called her a “literary critic, philosophy student, and needling social commentator rolled into one." And The Minneapolis Star Tribune summed her up in a headline that read “Part [Cole] Porter, Part Prince, All Art,” adding that Barber is “the most complete jazz artist today.” Born in a west Chicago suburb to a big-band saxophonist father who played on call with Glenn Miller and a sometime blues singer mother, Barber studied classical piano and psychology at the University of Iowa. She resisted the pull to become a jazz artist, but by the time she finished college her musical gifts had won out. Fame came early in the mid- 1980s when she began a nightly engagement at the legendary Gold Star Sardine Bar. A decade later her devoted following pursued her to the city's oldest and most popular club, the Green Mill, where she's continued to play Monday nights when she's in town. Barber has cut nine albums, with a tenth on the way. The first was her self-produced Split (1989), followed by A Distortion of Love (Polygram Antilles, 1992). From 1994 through 2002, when she came into her own as a songwriter, it was with a string of five discs for the Chicago indie label Premonition Records, all Barber-produced in collaboration with owner Mike Friedman, after which she went on to record for her current label Blue Note. Cafe Blue, Modern Cool and Nightclub shocked the musical community with their success; in fact Modern Cool, one of the first ever mainly originals jazz vocal albums, and then Nightclub, her first collection of standards, recorded for her mother, each sold well over 100,000 records. The year 2002 saw the issue of her first CD of all original material, the highly touted Verse (Premonition), followed in 2004 by a live-recorded tour through France issued as Live: A Fortnight In France (Blue Note) and documented in a one-hour film by award- winning director I. Michael Toth. With each new album, Barber's pianism has become more and more virtuosic, adventurous, and harmonically masterful, and her singing ever more subtle and shaded, with worldwide acclaim, on airwaves and international tours, growing apace. As Time Magazine wrote, "Cross Diana Krall with Susan Sontag, and you get Patricia Barber, whose throaty, come-hither vocals and coolly incisive piano are displayed to devastating effect." Barber's work is included in Blue Note’s three-disc A Story of Jazz. She has performed in such major performance centers as Carnegie Hall, Herbst Hall in San Francisco, the Opéra Comique, Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Cemal Resit Concert Hall in Istanbul, and major performing arts centers in such far-flung capitals as Seoul and Moscow, while receiving rave receptions at major jazz festivals the world over (the North Sea Jazz Festival, Netherlands, Umbria Jazz, Italy, and others in Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, Monterrey, Nice, New York, Dublin, Paris, Korea, Vancouver, etc.). She is a recipient of a Townsend Residential Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley where she lived and taught for a semester. Among sites of her renowned master classes, workshops, and lectures are Symphony Space and the Allen Room at Lincoln Center, New York, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the University of California at Davis, the Gleacher Center of the University of Chicago, Western Iowa Tech, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as well as private events and clinics the world over. Barber is on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Alright I Love You - Celebrating Lyricists Dorothy Parker and Carolyn Leigh

by Mary Foster Conklin
August 30, 2021

This broadcast celebrates two legendary lyricists: Dorothy Parker in the first hour and Carolyn Leigh in the second. Other highlights include new releases from pianist Patricia Barber, harpist Brandee Younger and a special project by vocalist Sarah Partridge celebrating women of science plus birthday shoutouts to Fostina Dixon, Naomi Moon Siegel, Trudy Pitts, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Linda May Han Oh and more. Thanks for listening and please support the artists you hear by purchasing their music during this time of ...

Album Review

Patricia Barber: Clique

by Tyran Grillo
August 13, 2021

These time-honored songs, lovingly curated, arranged, and performed by pianist/vocalist Patricia Barber and her band, are at last seeing the light of day when the world needs them more than ever. Pristinely recorded, Clique assembles what began as encores to live performances into an experience all its own. The album comes out of the same sessions that gave us Higher (see review for All About Jazz here), which immersed the fortunate listener in a world shaped by art song and ...

Radio & Podcasts

Paul Bley, Yazz Ahmed, Gianluigi Trovesi, Matthieu Michel and tons of great new releases

by Ludovico Granvassu
July 5, 2019

Accordion players, saxophonists, clarinet and trombone players as well as compelling singers are at the heart of this week's focus on new releases. Give a listen and then make sure to support the musicians and the labels that put out this amazing music so that the prolific jazz phase we live in can go on, and possibly keep getting better... Ben Allison “Mondo Jazz Theme (feat. Ted Nash & Pyeng Threadgill)" 0:00 Massimiliano Milesi “Redshift" Oofth (Auand) ...

Album Review

Patricia Barber: Higher

by Tyran Grillo
May 26, 2019

Patricia Barber is more than the sum of her talents. As a composer, she peels back the craft of song to expose its barest textures, cultivating each like a tree that, while holding its own shape above ground, makes apparent the roots below it. As a singer, she understands not only that we perform our voices but also that our voices perform us. Whether crooning through the Great American Songbook, as on Nightclub (Blue Note, 2000), or rowing through intensely ...

Radio & Podcasts

A Conversation with Pianist and Singer Patricia Barber

by Lorens Chuno
April 21, 2019

Patricia Barber's new album, Higher, is a storybook of songs complete with captivating—and sometimes outré—lyrics and a masterful story teller. Join Patricia and me, as she talks about art songs, European audience vs American audience, Shirley Horn, and other subtly related subjects. Higher features Patricia Barber on piano and voice, Patrick Mulcahy on bass, Jon Deitemyer on drums, Neal Alger on acoustic guitar, Jim Gailloreto on tenor saxophone, and Katherine Werbiansky on voice. Playlist ...

Album Review

Patricia Barber: Smash

Read "Smash" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 9, 2013

Vocalist/pianist Patricia Barber's 25-year career has been brilliantly marked by a complete unwillingness to compromise her approach to music. She exists in that uncharted creative realm where she successfully defies classification as a purveyor of any particular musical movement or genre. These characteristics spotlight Barber's role as an innovator and catalyst for musical evolution, a musician performing from the front edge rather than the middle of the creative muse. Barber readily shows her chops with standard and original material on ...

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Album Review

Patricia Barber: The Cole Porter Mix

Read "The Cole Porter Mix" reviewed by George Kanzler

by George Kanzler
September 17, 2008

The mix here is a Cole Porter cocktail, a dry martini but with a touch of jalapeno instead of olive. And while there are strains of melancholy, as Barber says in the notes: “Cole Porter never wrote a song that said 'I'm miserable.'" That jalapeno heat comes from the evocative jazz arrangements and solos, especially those of guest tenor saxophonist Chris Potter (on five of the 13 tracks) and acoustic and electric guitarist Neal Alger, as well as the singer's ...

Performance / Tour

Music Icon Patricia Barber 2020 European Tour Schedule & More!

Source: Scott Thompson Public Relations
November 22, 2019

American Composer & Jazz Icon Patricia Barber Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019. 2020 European Tour Announced! Press Praise Continues “Conspicuously literate and restlessly inventive." —The New Yorker Stereophile Editor's Pick, Downbeat, Jazziz, Chicago Tribune, London Jazz News, International Airplay! TSF France Radio Interview & Performance on November 25th! 3:30-4:30pm Paris Time (9:30-10:30am EDT U.S.) Upcoming Dates European / US Tour: 2019-2020 Nov 21: Le Colisee in Lens, France Nov 23: Teatro ...
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Performance / Tour

Patricia Barber Exciting Canadian Tour Now Preparing For Europe! Praise From Downbeat To Chicago Tribune!

Source: Scott Thompson Public Relations
August 8, 2019

American Composer / Jazz Pianist / Singer Patricia Barber Continues Green Mill Residency in Chicago Prepares for 2019 Fall European Tour Summer Canadian Tour Success Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences! Critical Praise for Higher DownBeat Feature (August) Jazziz Feature (July) London Jazz News Feature (July) Chicago Tribune Feature (June) Read the All About Jazz album review by Tyran Grillo American Academy of Arts and ...
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Award / Grant

Patricia Barber Elected To The American Academy Of Arts & Sciences 2019!

Source: Scott Thompson Public Relations
April 24, 2019

American Composer/Jazz Pianist/Singer Patricia Barber Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019! Recent Inductees Include: Wayne Shorter, Shulamit Ran, Maggie Nelson, Stephen Sondheim, Judith Butler, Keith Jarrett, and Bob Dylan On April 16, Patricia Barber was elected to the illustrious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society founded in 1780 to honor excellence and convene leaders from every field of human endeavor toward advancing the common good. Among others elected this year are Michelle ...
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Performance / Tour

The Patricia Barber Trio 2019 Higher Tour Moves Through U.S. Into Canada

Source: Scott Thompson Public Relations
April 12, 2019

American Composer/Songwriter, Jazz Singer/Pianist Patricia Barber Trio—Higher (ArtistShare)—First Release in Six Years! 2019 Higher Tour Moves Into Canada The Patricia Barber Trio featuring Patrick Mulcahy and Jon Deitemyer Internationally acclaimed American composer singer/pianist Patricia Barber is back with a new recording- HIGHER- on ArtistShare, her first since the critically celebrated Smash (Concord, 2013). Higher marks Barber's return with another form-shattering collection of original material. Following pack houses recently at Scullers (Boston), The Side Door (Old Lyme, CT) and ...
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Recording

Music Icon Patricia Barber - Higher- First Release In Six Years! First Release On Artistshare! Set for March 15

Source: Scott Thompson Public Relations
March 2, 2019

The Patricia Barber Trio featuring Patrick Mulcahy and Jon Deitemyer Internationally acclaimed American composer singer/pianist Patricia Barber is back with a new recording on ArtistShare, her first since the critically celebrated Smash (Concord, 2013). Higher marks Barber's return with another form-shattering collection of original material. Renowned as a singular songwriter for her harmonic sophistication and incisive lyrics, Barber made several albums for Premonition and Blue Note Records that sold over 100,000 copies. Barber, who has won a Guggenheim fellowship in ...
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Recording

Barber Meets Cole Porter on His Own Terms

Source: All About Jazz
September 16, 2008

At this late date, as the 20th Century recedes ever more quickly into the past, can anyone have anything significant to add to the work of America's most suavely literate songwriter, Cole Porter? Can anyone hope to find subtext in Porter's lyrics that Frank Sinatra didn't unearth decades ago? Can anyone dare to bring half as much sensuousness of sound to Porter's insinuating melodies as Ella Fitzgerald once did? Apparently yes, though one hastens to note that the Chicago singer-pianist ...
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133

Performance / Tour

Carnegie Hall News: Patricia Barber, 3/22/06

Source: All About Jazz
February 9, 2006

CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS JAZZ PIANIST-VOCALIST PATRICIA BARBER IN ZANKEL HALL ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22 AT 8:30 P.M. The Concert Includes Jazz Standards, Improvisations, and Original Compositions by Ms. Barber Jazz pianist-vocalist Patricia Barber performs jazz standards, improvisations, and her own original compositions in Zankel Hall on Wednesday, March 22 at 8:30 p.m. For this performance, Ms. Barber is joined by the members of her quartet-guitarist Neal Alger , bassist Michael Arnopol , and drummer Eric Montzka . This is the ...
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Performance / Tour

Joe Locke with the Patricia Barber Group

Source: All About Jazz
March 23, 2005

Vibraphonist Joe Locke with perform with The Patricia Barber Group as a Special Guest Artist during the first week of her two week residency at Le Jazz Au Bar in New York City, from May 3rd through May 8th. For further information on the Artists and venue, please visit the web sites listed below: Joe Locke: www.joelocke.com www.joelocke.net Patricia Barber: www.patriciabarber.com Le Jazz Au Bar: www.lejazzaubar.com Tom Marcello Manager/Joe Locke ...
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Recording

Patricia Barber's New Release "Live: A Fortnight in France" and Tour Info

Source: All About Jazz
September 1, 2004

After a two-year recording, during which she was awarded a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, the singular jazz singer-songwriter-pianist PATRICIA BARBER is back with her first live album since 1999's Companion. Her quartet (guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Mike Arnopol & Eric Montzka) has become a highly intuitively unit, a fact to which the ten performances on her new Blue Note recording Live: A Fortnight In France (release date: Sept. 7, 2004) testify.

“The most convincing jazz singer-songwriter since Peggy Leee, her ...
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Performance / Tour

Singer/Pianist Patricia Barber Continues To Garner Critical Acclaim For Her Most Recent CD, "Verse"

Source: All About Jazz
November 30, 2002

Barber Announces New 2003 U.S. Tour Dates For Her Quartet; Guitarist Neal Alger, Bassist Mike Arnopol, And Drummer Eric Montzka

Critical praise continues to pour in for Verse, the latest recording from groundbreaking singer/pianist Patricia Barber. The album, which was released on August 27th, was a first for Barber in that it consisted entirely of her own original compositions, a project that she informally dedicated to the songwriting talents of Joni Mitchell.

2002 found Barber giving her debut performance at ...
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"This is what Patricia Barber has: adventurous piano playing, a low-vibrato alto on perpetual rhythm and timbre alert and smart songs about the way we think and live, not just the way we love... This is the kind of art we need to be on the lookout for everywhere. The 21st century has started. We can’t afford to be left behind." —New York Times "The coolest singer/songwriter around." —Los Angeles Times

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