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BARB JUNGR: ENGLAND FIRST LADY OF JAZZ AND CABARET
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Diva Barb Jungr is a living legend. She is larger than life on stage. She is witty, captivating, warm and boiling with musical lava and unsurpassed vocal virtuosity. An English woman who sings like real, real, real Parisian cabaret singers? Like Piaf, for instance? Not really. Perhaps much better, because he is happier than those stuffy melodramatic French singers who complicate your life. French cabaret is intense because it is drama. Jungr's cabaret is happy, vivacious, filled with joy and hope. They compared her to Ute Lemper, Juliette Greco and Edith Piaf. Was it a good compliment or simply an analogy. I asked de Lafayette, and he replied :" It is fine to compare a new talent to an older one, to establish some credibility and adhere legitimacy and quality to the name of the new artist. But, when you have an artiste from the caliber of Barbara Jungr, such analogy is meaningless. For Barb is as good as Piaf, Greco and Lemper combined together." I rest my case. Boom! That was a powerful statement. Statement? Perhaps much more. That was de Lafayette's declaration of war!
ECCO DOMANI
ECCO DOMANI |
Chris Parker,
in the Jazz Review, 2004, wrote “Having
established herself as one of the most original and intelligent
interpreters of a lyric on the contemporary scene with her highly
individual takes on Brel (Chanson The Space In Between) and Dylan (Every
Grain Of Sand), Barb Jungr has cast her net wider on this, her third
Linn CD. Interspersed with her affecting, thought-provoking originals,
and a couple of visits to her beloved Dylan, are skilfully selected
songs by everyone from Ray Davies and Steve Miller to Leon Russell, the
Everly Brothers and Richard Thompson. Her version of 'Like A Rolling
Stone' replaces the original's splenetic, amphetamine-fuelled howl with
a gentle, probing approach, transforming the song's disturbing
triumphalism into a sympathetic, almost psychoanalytic, enquiry.
'Cathy's Clown' - a song neatly representative of a more ingenuous age
of songwriting, one that produced the likes of 'Hats Off To Larry',
'Little Town Flirt' and 'Running Scared' - is given a subtle veneer of
ambiguity in a neat regendered version that flirts with Western swing.
'The Joker' explores the mask/clown motif that runs through the album;
'Waterloo Sunset' is tellingly arranged not only with a view to
accentuating its achingly lovely melody, but also to emphasise the
quietly joyous poignancy of its lyric. Although less of an outright jazz
singer than, say, Lea DeLaria, Jungr is unrivalled for her ability to
inhabit a song's emotional world, and the combination of her subtly
enquiring sensibility and pleasingly tremulous vocal timbre with the
music of a neat, versatile, punchy band centred on the flawless Adrian
York is, although most effective in her entrancing live shows, utterly
beguiling on disc.”
