No discussion of what’s cool in jazz could possibly be complete without reference to the singer, songwriter, pianist and even actress from Chicago by way of her native Iowa City, Patricia Barber. One commentator on YouTube suggests that ‘she was cool in High School too!!’ It’s stretching a point to draw a comparison with Diana Krall on the basis that they both sing and play the piano equally well, but there’s a sense that Patricia Barber is like a Diana Krall that’s hatched from a fridge. Their vocal timbre is similarly pure, but whereas the latter’s approach to a melody is generally unfussy and quite conventional, the former’s is angular, risky and downright arty. Given her love for art in its many different guises (and she even sings about Picasso, Edward Hopper, Goya and David Hockney in her song, ‘If I Were Blue’), she could have been an experimental post-Impressionist artist, living the bohemian life in her apparently beloved Paris at the tail-end of the 19th century.
Everything she performs is cool, unhurried and low-key. She tends to play with a quartet made up of understated electric guitar, bass and drums. Her own songs, such as ‘White World’, come across like melodies taken out of a freezer and left on a windowsill to thaw. They’re often beautiful – ‘If I Were Blue’, for example, inspired film-maker Michael Toth to cast her in and commission her songs for his film, Gray In White and Black – but can totter over to the pretentious side. Her album Mythologies, for example, resulted from her award of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is built around a cycle of 11 songs, each based on a mythological character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Maybe one day she’ll re-imagine Virgil’s Aeneid as a jazz concerto.
No, my real appreciation of Patricia Barber is based more on her riveting interpretations of other people’s songs. Unlike Diana Krall, and apart from the notable exceptions of The Cole Porter Mix and memorable versions of ‘Witchcraft’ and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, she tends not to pick on standards (although when asked to name one song that she wished she had written, she opted for Johnny Mandel’s ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’), but looks more for the less obvious material, often from the world of rock: Tony Hatch’s ‘Call Me’, ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and especially ‘Light My Fire’ and Bill Withers’ ‘Use Me’ spring immediately to mind. So my search for a suitable, representative video centred mainly on these – and these last two in particular.
There’s a wealth of live material on YouTube, but it’s not always quite right. The video of ‘Witchcraft’ is intercut with travelogue images of Paris, for example, and although it clearly demonstrates what a fine pianist she is, she doesn’t actually sing on it. There’s a fine version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ that demonstrates the way she tends to work in real symbiosis with her quartet, but again the vocal is (almost) non-existent. ‘If I Were Blue’ is very fine and, with Stefon Harris on vibes, for me it’s a marriage made in Refrigerator Heaven, but as effectively a duet it’s again somewhat atypical.
So it boiled down to a shoot-out or rather perhaps an frosty stare-off between this version of ‘Use Me’, arguably Bill Withers’ most enduring song (worth a place in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame for the line alone, ‘My friends feel it’s their appointed duty…’), and the RTL performance of ‘Light My Fire’. God, it’s a close-run thing. She sings on the latter and plays a nice solo and yet… the band doesn’t quite gel. She calls out the names of her musicians at the end, but I don’t recognise them as regulars, whereas the ‘Use Me’ musicians are top-drawer Barber associates: Neal Alger on guitar, Eric Montzka on drums and, in this case, the most tasteful bongos you could ever wish for, and her most faithful of retainers, bass player Michael Arnopol. It’s not perfect – the star of the show doesn’t play any piano and seems to have trouble knowing what to do with her hands as a consequence, and some of you may not be willing to sit through a two-minute introductory double bass solo – but all three support players are at the top of their game, Barber’s vocal performance tingles the spine, and ultimately it’s so cool that it requires a pullover to watch it. So ‘Use Me’ it is, ladies and gentlemen.
In either case, ‘Use Me’ or ‘Light My Fire’, it underlines for me why jazz is such ‘a many splendoured’ genre. There’s nothing with quite the transformative power of jazz, how it can take even the most unpromising material and turn it into something else; fine art for the ears perhaps. John Coltrane’s re-working of ‘My Favourite Things’ is the classic case in point, pianist Brad Mehldau’s Plays The Beatles being another.
In talking about composing, Patricia Barber suggests that she can write topical songs, but prefers to write those that are more universal so they don’t become dated. And therein perhaps lies the rub. Whereas a popular song is often in essence a product of its time, jazz lifts it out of that time and renders it time-less and universal. When I hear the original ‘Light My Fire’, for example, I almost always visualise The Doors and images from that epoch, but when I hear it performed by Patricia Barber, I focus more on the song and its construction. Like a master builder, she has the ability to strip a song bare and piece it together in her own idiosyncratic way, to transform it into what she calls an ‘art song’. Perhaps what I hear is more something artistic than simply a version of one of the most beguiling rock songs ever written. While admitting that everyone starts out by imitating someone to some degree, jazz to her is not about imitation but about finding and being true to your own distinct voice. ‘Use Me’ seems to encapsulate the unique voice of Patricia Barber, an aesthete who deals in the fine art of fine jazz.
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