Chicago jazz pianist-singer won top honors in a recent Down Beat Critics Poll. She with the ultra-smooth voice, and cool jazz swagger also is an excellent composer and -- of late -- lyricist, with velvet-gloved satire. Of this regional treasure, Playboy/Chicago Reader critic Neil Tesser says, "Barber can rebuild and inhabit virtually any tune she tackles, spinning steel-lace improvisations at the piano, her singing voice as pure and chill as liquid oxygen." She plays Sunday and Monday nights at the Green Mill with drummer Jeff Stitely and bassist Michael Arnopol. Before that, she played regularly (for a decade) at the Gold Star Gardine Bar. A great, inexpensive, and uncrowded opportunity to catch what the L.A. Times Don Heckman calls "One of the most utterly individual jazz performers to arrive on the scene in years."
Converted to jazz while studying classical piano in college and remains a bit open-minded about music: she listens to Morphine, The Cranberries, and R.E.M. The new album, Modern Cool (Premonition) -- released at the end of June, 1998 -- features guitarist John McLean, the Choral Thunder Vocal Choir, and special guest Dave Douglas (who won a recent critic's choice at New York's Jazz Awards). Her previous albums include Cafe Blue, Split (1989), and A Distortion of Love (1992).
Chicago Magazine, who voted her "Best Torch Singer" in their 1999 "Best of Chicago" issue, saying "You've got to love a singer who can delivery Paul Anka ("She's a Lady"), Jim Morrison ("Light My Fire"), and e.e. cummings ("Love, Put on Your Faces") in a single set... a songwriter who gets Pierre Boulez, Bill Gates, and Karl Marx into the same smart lyric and still manages to give it a sexy groove."
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