Openly gay jazz musician Patricia Barber has been described by Time magazine thusly: 'Cross Diana Krall with Susan Sontag and you get Patricia Barber.' When I read that description of Barber's onstage persona and her music I thought it was pretty apt. In concert Barber doesn't say much and on recordings she seems to have earned the 'Mistress of Cool' title so often laid at her feet. Her songs are intelligent and sophisticated and some of them are VERY intense. The thought of interviewing her was therefore a bit daunting: would she want to discuss Picasso's blue period or Hemingway and discover that her interviewer wasn't in her league? But she was anything but difficult or an art snob. She's a musician and a songwriter, after all, two of the most intensely emotional professions on earth. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised that when I phoned her up at her Michigan retreat a bit hesitantly, she was sunny and warm, saying, 'Let's go!' Barber was eager to talk about Live: A Fortnight In France, her brand spanking new live recording on Blue Note records. She'll play a CD release concert at the Park West Sept. 11.
See www.patriciabarber.com/for more info.
WCT: One thing that I love about all your CDs and your work in general is that you have this great way of combining all these different styles and genres and you've done it again really well on this new CD, Live: A Fortnight In France. When you did 'She's A Lady' I think you proved to the world that literally any song can be reimagined in the jazz idiom.
PB: (laughs) That was part of the point to take the stupidest song I could find.
WCT: I think you've done that again with 'Call Me' on the new CD. It seems that the pop catalog of the '60s and '70s has become today's jazz standards. This is a silly question but do you think any of the pop songs from today are going to be tomorrow's jazz standards? Do you look forward to playing 'Smooth' and 'Milkshake' in about 20 years?
PB: Gosh, you know, I would assume so, I really would assume that will be the case. 'Call Me' is actually a good song and it has a nice harmonic progression. I don't see it as a stupid pop song like 'She's A Lady,' I really don't. I see it as more of a Brazilian harmonic structure. Let's say if a song has a good harmonic structure it will definitely last 25 years from now. I believe that, I do.
WCT: Is that what sometimes draws people into jazz today? People remembering songs like your wonderful version of 'Norwegian Wood' on this new recording?
PB: I hope it functions that way; I would hope it would function that way. I don't think that's why I do it. I would hope it would work that way, yes, as kind of an entrée into—you know—a notch up in sophistication.
WCT: Which you're all about. I also love that you're so steeped in fine art. We're going to get back to the new record but I know that you're doing a project inspired by one of Mary Zimmerman's Lookingglass Theatre productions. Can you just talk about that for a moment?
PB: Well I was aware that she did Metamorphoses at the Lookingglass and I couldn't get to it but I made sure that I got to it in New York. I was just bowled over and when I got the Guggenheim Fellowship I had been reading Ovid because of her production. I just loved it and I thought it was so smart and funny and the characters lent themselves to being reinterpreted by anybody. I had planned to do an eight-song cycle and right now I'm working on song number eight.
WCT: At this concert that you're going to do here on Sept. 11 at the Park West will you perform a couple of these pieces?
PB: Absolutely.
WCT: How long does it take you to write a piece like 'Whiteworld' from the new CD?
PB: Six weeks. 'If I Were Blue' took me a year. That song just defied me but I was on a deadline with 'Whiteworld' because it's part of the Guggenheim song cycle. It's about Oedipus.
WCT: Do songs just drop into your head or is it the analytical Sondheim 'OK, now I'm going to get the rhyming dictionary' approach?
PB: The latter. I mean every now and then a melody will transport you and you can start from there or a poetic line but it's definitely discipline and work. It's not like Kafka who would just sit down after working all day and spit out a story. It's not like that.
WCT: You seem to be inspired a lot as a songwriter by theater and literature and poetry—I mean 'Mourning Grace'—your music set to the poetry of Maya Angelou—is one of my all-time favorite pieces of yours—you still do that in concert, right?
PB: I do, yes! If you're lucky enough to be there on a night when I decide to do it. It has to be the end of a tour usually because I can't blow out my voice in the middle of a tour like that.
WCT: That's one of the few things that I can think of vocally where you really let loose and say, 'I'm not gonna be Patricia Cool Vocalist, I'm gonna be Patricia Wild Woman Vocalist.'
PB: (laughs big) Right.
WCT: I always think of jazz as loose—and yet your singing is very, very controlled. That's a dichotomy that runs throughout your work. Are you aware of that?
PB: It's not something that I want to think about too much but yes, that's my favorite kind of tension in art. I think that's what the Brazilian singers have to offer. They, in general, give you a very disciplined delivery and yet there's so much emotion encased in that timbre. I love that kind of tension in music when you're aware that there's something just underneath the surface.
WCT: Has the success of Diana Krall had any impact on your career? Has anyone said, 'We need you to do a little more accessible material?'
PB: They would never say that to me! (laughs)
WCT: They wouldn't have the nerve!
PB: They would not dare … I think Diana Krall's success has only been good for music. I'm a fan of hers and I believe she's a fan of mine. We've meet and she was interested in doing some of my songs.
WCT: What do you want listeners to take away from Live: A Fortnight In France, the new recording? What are you really, really proud of?
PB: I guess the way the quartet sounds now, that's what I'm proudest of. We've worked together, I've worked with them and I've given them new material, new chord changes on new songs—'Pieces' and 'Whiteworld' and 'Crash' and what they have to bring to it individually too with my blessing or permission. I think we have a very unique sound now.
WCT: You always seem so serious onstage and you're really playful and fun! Are you really having fun up there?
PB: (laughs) I'm not sure 'fun' is the word. Sometimes I have fun; it's very fulfilling. Partly why I seem serious is because I have stage fright.
WCT: What do you do to—
PB: I concentrate on the music, otherwise if I think about where I am I'm just going to run away.
WCT: You gotta really love what you do. You gotta really have a need to communicate with an audience.
PB: Yeah but I do have a lot of time, too, you know—
WCT: To gear up for it?
PB: Yeah—to gear up for it and also because like you said, it's a bit of a torturous route. A lot of performers have that.
WCT: I know you've said that being a gay woman in jazz is like a blip on the radar screen and you haven't experienced discrimination, which I think is terrific, but do you discern any differences between predominately straight audiences and gay audiences?
PB: I don't because I don't run into those separate audiences. I couldn't tell you what that would feel like. My audience is very mixed so I don't know what an all-gay audience or an all-straight one would be.
WCT: Are you aware of a big gay following?
PB: There's some following, I'm not sure it's huge. I mean if you look at the audience at the Green Mill it looks more straight than gay to me, but there are definitely gay couples and people there.
WCT: Well it's gotta be people who love jazz and music in general. I just finished a two-month run there—not a musical show—but every week when we did the show I got to sit at what I came to think of as Patricia Barber's piano, which led me to wonder how long you've played there. A long time, right? Two decades?
PB: (laughs) Seven or eight years I think.
WCT: That's like your home base?
PB: In Chicago, certainly.
WCT: So why music? Why jazz?
PB: Honestly, it's in your blood. You just pop out of the womb and you can play every instrument that anybody puts in your hand or you can't and that's that. I never needed music and that's the way most professional musicians are. They're just gifted genetically.
WCT: It's kind of a curse, too, isn't it? For someone who's so shy?
PB: Well, yeah, when you add that performance element, yes. Someday I'm going to just compose music and record it like Glenn Gould. I'm just going to keep getting stranger and stranger.
WCT: Not a bad goal—to become the Glenn Gould of jazz.
PB: Yes, I'm just going to get stranger and stranger (laughs)!