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Patricia Barber
LIVE: A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE
(Blue Note)
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"Did you ever think a piano could fall on your head?/Do you look over your shoulder at all?/On the dark side of passion comes a taste for revenge." All this is delivered over a slow, insidious groove in a bluesy sing-speech, a narrow tessitura, smoky, with the barest trace of vibrato. "The IRS is on your tail/A private dick is in your mail," the singer warns. This is Patricia Barber as her fans have come to know her — urbane, smart, literate, with a taste for noirish irony. She also happens to be a terrific pianist, as you can hear in the cleanly articulated speedy lines of the instrumental "Crash" or the standard "Witchcraft," and a superb bandleader, as you can hear in the balance of groove and solo outbursts throughout A Fortnight in France. Barber describes it as a typical live set: half originals and half covers, with a couple of new tunes thrown in (that opening noir, "Gotcha," and the Oedipus-as-white-anthropologist/imperialist "Whiteworld"). If none of the current wave of new female vocal jazz stars — Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Jane Monheit — equals Barber for smarts and invention, there’s nothing in jazz quite like her band, either. Guitarist Michael Arnopol matches jazzman dexterity and harmonic mastery with rockist tone. And bassist Michael Arnopol and Eric Montzka help Barber define her idiosyncratic straddling of jazz and pop. (The Patricia Barber Quartet performs this Friday and Saturday, October 1 and 2, at the Real Deal Jazz Club in the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second Street in East Cambridge; call 617-876-7777.)
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