Born in the Chicago suburbs, Patricia Barber came by music naturally: her father, Floyd “Shim” Barber, was a saxophonist who had worked with Glenn Miller’s orchestra, and she began playing classical piano at the age of 6. But when her father died three year later, the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and by the time she had graduated high school, Barber – determined to avoid the pitfalls awaiting a woman in jazz – has decided to bury her roots forever, pursuing a double major in classical music and psychology at the University of Iowa.

Eventually the jazz echoes she thought she banished began to grow louder. She soon returned to Chicago, and in 1984, landed the gig that put her (and the venue at which she performed) on the national jazz map: five nights a week at the intimate Gold Star Sardine Bar. As her reputation spread, thanks to lionized performances at the Chicago Jazz Festival (1988) and the North Sea Jazz Festival (1989), Barber released her major label debut A Distorsion of Love, in 1992. Two years later, café blue, took the music world by storm, gaining rave reviews across the nation and garnering significant airplay on a wide range of FM formats. Barber was launched into the spotlight.

Nightclub contains twelve songs, mostly classics of the American repertoire, mostly four minutes or less in lenght, all presented with spare trio accompaniment and with deeply respectful absence of irony. Startling but, upon further consideration, inevitable. Barber explains, “These songs are the library. And they are what I’ve been doing for 20 years. I intentionally didn’t make a recording of all standards before because I wanted to try to define myself in a different way. Now I feel like I’ve done that. Basically Nightclub is for the fans who’ve been with me for all those late night gigs. And it’s also for me. It’s just time.” From the opening track, “Bye Bye Blackbird” the fascination of Nightclub is to hear the astonishing Barber voice (inside) these songs, giving itself over the material that is (in the words of Keith Jarrett) “part of our tribal language.”

August 2001

Biography courtesy of Ted Kurland Associates