Pianist-vocalist Patricia Barber has forged a brilliant career as both a chic/smart interpreter of songs and a songwriter who pens witty and gorgeous numbers. She inhabits a rarified career stratum with just a few jazz artists who combine artistic sophistication and critical acclaim with concert and recording success. With a keen ear for melody, a dark-tinted alto voice that is part mystery, part whimsy, and an adventurous approach to playing the piano, the Chicago-based Barber has been winning over audiences for the past decade on the merits of several “coolly modern” albums released jointly by Premonition and Blue Note Records.

Barber has been in the vanguard of the new school of female jazz vocalists who in the past decade have been exploring intriguing improvisational terrain beyond classic balladry and bop-infused standards. She was born in a suburb of Chicago to a saxophone-playing father, Floyd "Shim" Barber, who had played with Glenn Miller. After studying classical piano and psychology at the University of Iowa, Barber moved back to Chicago to play jazz and in 1984 landed the gig that launched her career, playing five nights a week at the famed Gold Star Sardine Bar. Before long there were lines outside the door on weekends. Her following grew larger and more fanatical when, in 1994, she moved her base of operations to the Green Mill, the north side club that is the nerve center of the indigenous Chicago jazz scene. Barber was presented with a scholarship to Northwestern University and returned to obtain a Masters of Music degree in 1996.

Barber has recorded seven albums. The first, in 1989, a self- produced CD on Floyd Records called Split. Later two critically acclaimed full-length CDs for Blue Note/Premonition, Modern Cool (1998) and Nightclub (2000), and the Blue Note/Premonition six-track EP Companion (1999). Her major label debut was A Distortion Of Love, on Antilles, in 1992. But for most of her current audience, it all began with Café Blue, on Premonition (later Blue Note/Premonition), in 1994. It hit like something inexplicable, introducing a voice one critic described as "a pure dark whisper straight up from the soul" and a distinct onstage persona that has been characterized as "a beat musician and a bop intellectual." Café Blue led to Barber winning the "Female Vocalist/Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" category in the 1995 Down Beat International Critics Poll (an honor that she has since consistently claimed). After Modern Cool, the 5 star Downbeat award winning critical and commerical success, came the all original masterpiece Verse (2002)recorded again on Blue Note/Premonition; this 10 song tour de force in combination with the striking originality of Modern Cool set a new standard for songwriters across genres and was especially important in paving a future direction for jazz.

Learn More >

In 2003, the acclaimed singer-pianist-composer Patricia Barber became one of the few Jazz musicians ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she took the opportunity to create one of the most ambitious and affecting works of her career. 'Mythologies' is a song cycle based on Greek mythology, which uses characters from The Metamorphoses of Ovid as the basis for each of the 11 songs, giving these timeless stories a uniquely contemporary and compelling musical setting. 'Mythologies' will be released on Blue Note Records on August 15th.

- CLICK HERE -