Singer-songwriter and pianist Patricia Barber was singing about that same technoskepticism while Spalding was still in high school. “Company,” off her breakthrough 1998 album, got a suave and sophisticated redux on Friday, Barber preparing the Pavilion Steinway to sound like a hollow banjo and Jon Deitemyer holding down the skittering rimshot groove.
No one on the Chicago scene writes music remotely like Barber’s. Who else could reference Hockney, Hopper, Goya and Picasso without eliciting eyerolls (from 2002’s “If I Were Blue”), or write couplets like “Do you think of me like salt? / Do you taste me in your tears?” (from 2008’s “Snow”)? Or smuggle progressive jazz — those lancelet-sharp lyrics, on a canvas of fuzzed-out guitar and progressive harmony — in lounge-listening sheep’s clothing?
And yet: Barber has not played the Chicago Jazz Festival since 1992, near the very start of her local career. When she did, she said, she was warned by a member of the festival committee not to play any originals.
But on Friday? “I just played a set of all original music,” Barber said, to raucous applause.
Her thoughtful colleagues helped those subtleties sing. Like Barber’s music itself, guitarist Neal Algers subtly bucks expectation, from his harmonic slipperiness to étude-like efficiency in his solo passagework off Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” And bassist Emma Dayhuff has been a high point of every ensemble I’ve heard her in, urging bandmates and audience alike to think deeper, listen deeper. In her first solo, Dayhuff hushed her sound over the course of the solo; the others onstage followed her. The entire Pavilion seemed lean in, hanging off her every note.
