In 2003 songwriter, pianist and bandleader Barber received a Guggenheim fellowship to write a song cycle based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
So far so bad, you may think but Patricia Barber’s personal and highly accessible style of jazz was well up to the task as she composed 11 pieces around characters from the Roman poet’s text. In style, linguistic context and feel her use of the vernacular to emphasise the eternal nature of the subject matter fits perfectly with her own mix of jazz and sophisticated literary pop. Don’t be put off by the subject matter, it just proves that all good literature is translatable into jazz. This is Barber’s masterpiece.
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Track Listing :
The Moon; Morpheus; Pygmalian; Hunger; Icarus; Orpheus /Sonnet; Persephone; Narcissus; Whiteworld / Oedipus; Phaeton; The Hours.
Personnel :
Patricia Barber (piano, vocal); Jim Gailloreto (tenor sax); Neal Alger (guitar); Michael Arnopol (bass); Eric Montzka (drums); Grazyna Auguscik, Paula Falk, Lawrice Flowers, Bryan Johnson, Walter Owens, Airreal Watkins (vocal).
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