PATRICIA BARBER
VERSE

Premonition/Blue Note

Read the Jazzitude review of Patricia Barber/A Fortnight In France
Read the Jazzitude review of Patricia Barber/Mythologies

“Should I leave Erebus/to his own device?” is the way the song “Moon”, the lead track of Patricia Barber’s exquisite tour de force Verse, begins. No doubt many will berunning for their old college texts to refresh their memories as to who Erebus was. But Barber is not being precious; the goddesses of the moon have always been keepers of mystery and wisdom, but they are not immune to the vagaries of love, which is the true topic of the ten Barber-composed meditations on this CD. “still a broken heart/is a broken heart/and illumination/is in fact/Performance.”

Patricia Barber has recorded a series of excellent albums over the course of the past decade. Her earliest albums on the Antilles label taught her to be wary of recording companies and to maintain control of her work (her albums are released by Chicago’s Premonition label, with a distribution arrangement with Blue Note), and since 1994’s café blue she has blazed her own path, deftly combining her own compositions and standards to create a body of work that pays homage not only to the great American songbook composers but also to the innovative songwriting of the counterculture and alternative rock/pop scene of today. “I have been diligent about trying to learn from, absorb, and acknowledge the great American songwriters whose songs have been appropriated as repertoire by the jazz masters,” says Patricia. “And yet, we are all a product of our time, and there are definite aspects of alternative pop music and contemporary classical music on this recording as well. On this CD there is respectful homage to Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Mose Allison, Rogers and Hart, Joni Mitchell, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sting and many more."

Like one of her biggest influences, Joni Mitchell, Barber is not a prisoner to form, not constrained by the verse, chorus, verse structure that has always been a mainstay of popular songwriting. "Sometimes I start with a melodic or rhythmic hook, or maybe a harmonic progression. Sometimes I just let my emotions dictate the course." Being a jazz pianist and having a familiarity with the jazz repertoire certainly has to be helpful in allowing her songwriting to stretch out in new directions.

Barber works with a wide variety of moods and feelings on Verse, from the giddiness of love (“Lost In This Love”) to the unsettling feeling of losing oneself (“Pieces”) to the sumptuous luxury of fantasy (“I Could Eat Your Words”) to the pain of realizing love has moved on (“The Fire”) to the slight melancholy of memory (“Dansons La Gigue”) and the low point of an ending with the promise of a new beginning (“If I Were Blue”). Verse is aptly named, as Barber is drunk with words, taking pleasure in their sound, their pronunciation, and their meanings, both intended and hidden. “if blunder would blaze like neon/or a Christmas tree with lights/if words spoken in certain sequence/were outlined in black and white/would these clues forecast/disaster within the ordinary life?” she sings on “Clues”, and there’s plenty of foreboding in the catalog of phrases that end the song, stripped of their clichéd meaning and suddenly pregnant with meaning.

“I Could Eat Your Words” is about a love affair with words and with thought, as well as with food and the narrator’s philosophy professor. Barber got into the habit of reading cookbooks while working on this song. It is not only a lyrical triumph, but also a musical one, featuring the effective trumpet work of Dave Douglas and also one of the few songs on the disc that is built on Barber’s piano playing, which seems unusual given her impressive playing on previous albums. “The producer in me deliberately made this decision and the pianist in me regretted it,” says Patricia about her decision to make Douglas and guitarist Neal Alger the instrumental focus of the album. “Also, the way I was hearing the songs in my head had more to do with the guitar than the piano. In a loose way, Verse is a Patricia Barber homage to Joni Mitchell."

To put it quite simply, Verse is one of the best albums of original songwriting released in recent memory, an album of adult music for adult tastes delivered with wit and sophistication. That it comes from the jazz side of the musical fence (if such a fence can truly be said to exist outside of marketing departments) should surprise no one, since pop music has largely ignored its own sophisticated performers in place of music for pre-teens, forcing many of them to consider alternative sounds such as jazz, alt-country, folk, and world music as a means of expression. Barber is actively looking for ways to relate the lives most of us lead to jazz and the craft of songwriting, because while we all admire the work of Cole Porter and wish we inhabited the world his songs describe, most of us simply do not. The songs on Verse describe the emotional world of love we all have experienced while at the same time aspiring to the height of beauty and sophistication. Expressing the universal elegantly is what Barber is all about on this CD, much like Shakespeare and the classical Greeks she references.