Patricia Barber at City Winery - DC

Doors open at 6:00pm

“Few performers in or out of jazz are as consistently brilliant as Patricia Barber” wrote Jazz Times. 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, her mother a blues singer. Barber’s “career has been brilliantly marked by a complete unwillingness to compromise her approach to music,” wrote 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.”...

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Doors open at 6:00pm

“Few performers in or out of jazz are as consistently brilliant as Patricia Barber” wrote Jazz Times. 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, her mother a blues singer. Barber’s “career has been brilliantly marked by a complete unwillingness to compromise her approach to music,” wrote 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 30-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. She holds down a renowned Monday night house gig at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill Jazz Club when she’s not on tour.

In 2015 she embarked on a successful tour with preeminent lyric soprano Renée Fleming entitled “Higher: Renée Fleming and Patricia Barber Perform the Music of Patricia Barber.” The next year Barber opened Chicago Ear Taxi New Music Festival in Chicago’s Millennium Park. This year Patricia has been inducted into the illustrious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, class of 2019.

The album delivers a sea of serenity and crystalline works, sometimes full of emotion, and then full of hope, or even humor. Yes, from a textual and musical point of view, Higher is a poetic gem that far surpasses Barber's previous works. And that is remarkable for an artist who has set the bar extremely high for herself for three decades. —Hifi.nl

"As a pianist and vocalist, she is a force to be reckoned with. As a songwriter, she is pure devastation.” —Jazz Police

“Conspicuously literate and restlessly inventive.” —The New Yorker

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