Patricia Barber is more than the sum of her talents. As a composer, she peels back the craft of song to expose its barest textures, cultivating each like a tree that, while holding its own shape above ground, makes apparent the roots below it. As a singer, she understands not only that we perform our voices but also that our voices perform us. Whether crooning through the Great American Songbook, as on Nightclub (Blue Note, 2000), or rowing through intensely original waters, as on the Ovidinspired Mythologies (Blue Note, 2006), she shapes words and meanings as one and the same.