The Patricia Barber Trio at Occidental Center For The Arts

OCA welcomes internationally acclaimed American composer, jazz singer and pianist Patricia Barber. Please join us for this special Valentine's Day performance and experience world-class jazz in our intimate venue!

Currently on national tour with Patrick Mulcahy (bass ) and Jon Deitmyer (drums), the Patricia Barber Trio brings top-shelf jazz, performing a combination of form-shattering original materials from Barber's latest album "Higher" as well a selection of original songs from her career spanning more than 25 years as an innovative and driving force in the American contemporary jazz scene....

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OCA welcomes internationally acclaimed American composer, jazz singer and pianist Patricia Barber. Please join us for this special Valentine's Day performance and experience world-class jazz in our intimate venue!

Currently on national tour with Patrick Mulcahy (bass ) and Jon Deitmyer (drums), the Patricia Barber Trio brings top-shelf jazz, performing a combination of form-shattering original materials from Barber's latest album "Higher" as well a selection of original songs from her career spanning more than 25 years as an innovative and driving force in the American contemporary jazz scene.

Tickets are $25/advance and $30 at the door (if available). This event is expected to sell out - get your tickets early! Fine refreshments and champagne/beer/wine available, venue is wheelchair accessible.

Patricia Barber Biography

Renowned as a singular songwriter for her harmonic sophistication and incisive lyrics, Barber has made several albums for Premonition and Blue Note Records. Barber is first non-classical composer to win a Guggenheim fellowship and brings thrilling original material into the jazz orbit.

A believer in the music inherent in language as well as a supremely gifted vocalist and master of the keys, Barber has the practiced eye and ear of a poet. In a 2005 essay in Poetry Magazine, under the evocative title, Bolts of Melody, Barber explained her artistic convictions.

Music is a demanding but mysterious discipline It is a gift endowed by blood, then perfected by tremendous desire and perseverance but for me art can be created neither by logic nor diligence. Like music, poetry is created in the mouth, in the ear, and in the air. As poetry is music and music is magic, so too is poetry magic.

Barber spent her early years building her reputation at Chicago's Green Mill, a joint oozing with character that was owned in the 1920s by a lieutenant of Al Capone and is today considered the city's leading jazz room. When not on tour, she continues to perform there every Monday night. She has also played most of the worlds major jazz festivals, and in 2016 she opened the Ear Taxi New Music Festival at the Harris Theater in Chicagos Millennium Park. An active collaborator with other artists, Barber has performed with vibraphonist Stefon Harris at the Montreal Jazz Festival and Detroits Fischer Music Center and with pianist Kenny Werner in such venues as Evanstons Pick-Staiger Hall and Montreals Maison Symphonique.

Ever the student, Barber returned to academia in the mid-90s to earn her masters degree in jazz pedagogy while studying twentieth-century music at Northwestern University. She continues to give master classes in this country and overseas. In 2007 she was awarded a resident fellowship at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley where she taught students and performed concerts.

With the release of Higher, a recording featuring her original song cycle, Angels, Birdsand I, Barber has reached new heights of daring and imagination. Singers all over the world are performing Patricia's songs and recently classical singers too have been putting them into their recital programs, following Flemings lead.

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