Customer Reviews

Modern Cool

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Patricia Barber is non-stop amazing and is often still undiscovered.
This album is hearty, provocative, sophisticated and is on the cutting edge of Jazz
at it's best! Keep it in your back pocket, sense it in your fingertips and play it in the disk player
that is your mouth. Reactive and Awesome! Barber deserves recognition and more spotlight!

THIS IS PATRICIA BARBER S ANSWER HOW A FEMALE JAZZ SINGER SHOULD BE.A modern masterpiece of vocal jazz .Not a weak composition at all superb lyrics full of passion and most of all her ability to blend folk gospel jazz and blues elements into one line hand in hand together with her poetic enlightments.The result leaves you spechless with a taste of astonishment.It is a very demanding recording and very rare one. Actually do not expect a similar recording of such a quality to come out in the next years .Patricia has created her own unique style of performance in MODERN COOL that has such a strong impact and signature so as to describe personally this recording as A REFERENCE one .It is a recording in its field that will judge without mercy anyone who will dare to provoke or demand equal recognition without a good reason .

Patricia Barber is exquisite! I can think of a lot of adjectives to describe her music but "Intelligent" says it best. I'm impressed with her skill as a pianist and even more impressed with her poetic insight. Enjoy!

This one of the finest vocal jazz albums I've listened to. Very layered and textured and at times oddly spare. I love it.

When Patricia Barber can do so much more with a song than Krall does? In light of Krall's new CD garnering headlines, photo shoots, and talk, I thought it was time to give Barber the props she so richly deserves. This is the jazz vocal CD I reach for when I want something edgy, "push-the-envelope," and/or a bit unsettling---not just smooth (or "smooth"), slick, and overproduced. . . . "Touch of Trash," the opener, is a perfect example of that edgy, unsettling sound that she so naturally exudes. "Winter," with its 7/4 time signature, is one of those "this doesn't feel quite exactly right" kind of songs that challenges your brain not to relax too much. The use of e. e. cummings' poetry is very cool to me as a high school English teacher (I play this song to my juniors every year). She takes a song like "Light My Fire" and goes places with it that the Doors never intended (nor could have done). Her piano skills should not be overlooked, either.

This is not a CD of standards, classics, or tributes. This is not a CD of smooth, easy listening, radio-friendly tunes. Barber is not a JVC Jazz Festival kind of artist. This is not a CD you want to try to listen to and appreciate while driving to work. It is a complicated, unique, evocative, intimate, challenging collection of songs that Barber delivers with a passion matched by virtually no one (Cassandra Wilson and Shirley Horn would be her main competitors in my collection).

If you like your jazz "smooth" and want to see a set of legs on the side, buy Diana Krall's new CD (or one of her old ones from me. . .). If you want to be put out of your comfort zone for an hour or so, you'll find that MODERN COOL pays off big time.

To dismiss her as simply being "butch" (as did a reviewer three or four reviews down) really demeans her musicianship and shows that reviewer to be just a bit too safe and naive for someone in Barber's league. Barber does through her singing what Krall can only do by showing a little (or a lot) of leg in a photo shoot. . . .