Patricia Barber at Kuumbwa Jazz Center

“Few performers in or out of jazz are as consistently brilliant as Patricia Barber” writes JazzTimes. Born outside Chicago in 1955, Barber came by music naturally. Her father was Floyd “Shim” Barber, a saxophonist who played intermittently with Glenn Miller’s orchestra, and her mother was a blues singer. Barber’s “career has been brilliantly marked by a complete unwillingness to compromise her approach to music,” says All about Jazz. “She exists in that uncharted creative realm where she successfully defies classification…These characteristics spotlight Barber’s role as an innovator and catalyst for musical evolution, a musician performing from the front edge rather than the middle of the creative muse.” Barber’s thirty-year legacy with Premonition and Blue Note Records includes three albums selling over 100,000 copies each...

read more

“Few performers in or out of jazz are as consistently brilliant as Patricia Barber” writes JazzTimes. Born outside Chicago in 1955, Barber came by music naturally. Her father was Floyd “Shim” Barber, a saxophonist who played intermittently with Glenn Miller’s orchestra, and her mother was a blues singer. Barber’s “career has been brilliantly marked by a complete unwillingness to compromise her approach to music,” says All about Jazz. “She exists in that uncharted creative realm where she successfully defies classification…These characteristics spotlight Barber’s role as an innovator and catalyst for musical evolution, a musician performing from the front edge rather than the middle of the creative muse.” Barber’s thirty-year legacy with Premonition and Blue Note Records includes three albums selling over 100,000 copies each. In 2003, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, the first songwriter ever to do so. She has toured the world’s concert venues and festivals and holds down a renowned Monday night house gig at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill Jazz Club when she’s not on tour.

show less