Patricia Barber Quartet

• Reduced mobility
• Magnetic loop

Patricia Barber, owner of one of the most substantial voices in contemporary jazz, is back in town. She is a different artist who has managed to carve out a musical space for herself in which she suggests the ideas, builds the pieces with her piano, brings friends in to play other instruments in the adventure of harmonising and, in the end, adds her voice to the resulting material, extracting an emotion not easily found in other performers.

Last year she released an album called Clique which was full of songs that – as we’ve seen on previous albums – still offer a glimpse of all the arguments that have fuelled her imagination since she made the definitive leap to the professional scene in Chicago in 1994. Back then, her only claim to fame was the fact that she was the daughter of Floyd Shim Barber, a musician who once played saxophone in the Glenn Miller orchestra.

Patricia Barber has a dusky contralto voice full of blues resonance, always in perfect harmony with the notes she extracts from the piano. The power of her expressiveness lies in her diction, in her persuasiveness, in the wise choices she makes at every moment. She has reached that point of perfect maturity where all artificiality is spurned: the point where her personal style can flow freely. With such austere elements, she will return to once again reveal her sensitivity to us.

Awards keep accumulating in this woman’s biography, as do her albums. In them, apart from developing her own ideas, Patricia has also embraced the music of Henry Mancini, The Beatles, The Doors, Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, among others. And there is no mannerism in the way she approaches these songs. Everything springs, quite simply, from the reality of the present, even if it is sometimes at odds with the traditions of modern jazz, which has been around for more than sixty years. And, finally, when she reflects on emotions in all their magnitude, there is always an intense emotional tension in her lyrics. The audience’s eyes will light up once again when she appears on stage.

It would be hard to find a better offering to ensure that JAZZMADRID continues to offer a broad and rigorous panorama of the jazz being made by women today.