"One for the Road:" Patricia Barber

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 7, 2011 10:30PM

We had some time to actually plan out "One for the Road" this week and thought we'd do something of a "Green Mill Revisited" theme, looking back at the musicians that were the hallmarks of the venerable Uptown jazz club's weekly schedule over the years. Since this is Monday, that meant for going to see Patricia Barber, the Guggenheim Fellowship winner who took the prize and used it to write her 2006 masterpiece Mythologies, a set of songs based on Ovid's Metamorphoses that should be an essential for the hardcore jazz collector.

Here we found a performance of one of the strongest songs off that album, "Persephone," largely because Barber took poetic license with the character and wrote the song from the perspective that Persephone enjoyed being down in Hell and, like Eve after biting into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, becomes a temptress in Barber's hands.