Jazz

Patricia Barber: Modern Cool (Blue Note)

Patricia Barber: Modern Cool (Blue Note)

It has taken 20 years for singer, songwriter and pianist Barber to become, with this album, an overnight success in America. She's a strikingly individual talent, the songs literate, engaged, ironic, melancholic, with something of a rapper's stream-of-consciousness, but more subtly and rigorously thought through - and with a matchingly atmospheric delivery. If the emotional climate is narrow, it's nevertheless rich and sophisticated. She's blessed with trumpeter Dave Douglas, whose ability to key his solos within that world and comment on it, yet remain emphatically original, is also a major plus. But it's still her world; even the non-Barber material - songs by Paul Anka, Jim Morrison, a standard - comes out hers alone.

- Ray Comiskey

Sonny Fortune: In The Spirit Of John Coltrane (Shanachie)

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Mixed feelings about this Coltrane tribute. On the one hand, Fortune is a superb saxophonist, with the kind of passion, skill, flexible time and harmonic open-ness to make this work; on the other, pianist John Hicks, another exceptional musician, has more conventional time and seems more in need of the comfort of changes. The difference in emphasis is obvious throughout, with Fortune's Hanging Out With JC, a harmonic obstacle course like Coltrane's Countdown, a typical example. But Fortune is at his most persuasive on Coltrane's Africa and Ole, liberated by the static vamp of the first and the absence of piano on the second. He may lack Coltrane's majestic spirituality, but not his volcanic energy or instrumental command.

- Ray Comiskey